


When Tomorrow Hits

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Addiction, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HIV/AIDS, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Punk, Seattle, Werewolves, Withdrawal, Wizard Rock, Wizarding Politics, Yearning Longing Pining Etc.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 18:31:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15467430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Idaho, 1992. A story about survival.





	When Tomorrow Hits

**Author's Note:**

> NB: some pieces of this story will make more sense if you have read the preceding story in the series, [minuet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14427546)
> 
> as per usual with this series, i am very serious about the drug and alcohol addiction tags; if these elements are triggering, or if you are looking for an escape from the real world, this is probably not the story for you. please let me know if i should tag or warn for anything else i've left out.

 

** February 1992 **

** \-- **

I. 

Lockett’s consciousness was blown all over these blood-drenched psychic fields of pain like loose dandelion spores. They were familiar-enough psychic fields that select among the spores had begun to recall the shattered-glass fragments of previous visitations, which had been several. First the Event. The disowning following the Event (purely psychic). Subsequent maulings and overdoses and diagnoses whose precise counting might be given in other unnameable measurements besides their number. And then the grief, which was also purely psychic, unless he had endeavored to actualize the pain. Well-wandered fields — or, rather, fields well-traversed by the blowing spores — featureless and fallow, no furrows, no moisture or green life in the dead dust. Breaking, broken things. Needle-sharp shards of straw. Here and there like jewels infertile seeds and kernels resting in the dirt. No sky. No earth either — just a sense — 

Next to him but far away in the big bed in the trailer by the Salmon River, Graeme Sugarbush twitched. 

Lockett peeled one eye open. It was dark outside and anyway the blinds were pulled shut but regardless a kind of railroad spike was hammered two strokes deeper into his skull through the open eye. The spores collected together enough from where they had been cast to repeat the mantra again, as they had been repeating now for days, slightly updated now with the passage of time: 

_Your last living relative, your mother, has been dead a week. It has been one day, one night, another day, another night, a third day, and now half a third night since you have last taken heroin. You are here in your parents’ marriage bed in the trailer at 51 Shady Acres Lane in Riggins Idaho where you were born twenty four years ago. Next to you is your friend who has not had a drink in half a day, a night, another day, another night, a third day, and now half a third night. He is somewhat more likely than you to die._

Lockett sat up. The spike drove deeper. Something smelled bad, like a metal thing rotting in the woods. His movement pulled the edge of the blanket from Graeme’s shoulder. The sleeve of his t-shirt had slipped up showing a spotty drunken stick and poke tattoo of something illegible in the darkness. “Lockett,” Graeme said, not turning towards him. His voice was like his normal voice had been put through some kind of uncanny audio processing, slowed down, deepened, sharpened, distorted. 

“Hmm.” 

Graeme inhaled and exhaled deeply. His breath shook. “The bugs,” he said. 

“I feel them too,” Lockett told him. “They’re not real.” 

“They are,” Graeme whispered. As though they might hear. “I can see them.” 

Before this, Lockett had gone to the public library in Seattle and photocopied the relevant sections in some pertinent medical texts having to do with alcohol withdrawal. He had read over them with as much focus as he could muster considering his own diminished state. Regardless he thought he remembered _visual hallucinations_. 

“They’re not real,” Lockett said again. It would probably be best not to explain, your brain is making them up. It’s filling its own void. Biochemical regulation cascade. “We could put on the light so you can see.” 

“It hurts you to put on the light,” Graeme reminded him. 

“Graeme — ”

“It hurts you.” 

He had been trying to put firmness behind this but it was no use and all his voice did was crack a little. Lockett’s heart moved. There was no other way to describe the feeling. It moved. It didn’t feel good. 

He got up and went to the tiny bathroom and tried to throw up. He thought he wanted to, but nothing happened. So he went to the kitchen and drank as much water as he could stand directly from the sink, out of his cupped hands. He thought he had to throw up again, and this time he went outside. It was humid-cold, raining in spits between the heavy, clustered pines. The moon was shrinking away from full and the clouds passed quickly over it showing on delightful, delirious occasion the high ridges and spines of the mountains on either side of the river. What a mindfuck to be back in the place where you grew up trying to birth yourself again. He thought about his mother, who likely would have embarked on a crusade to change Idahoan magical inheritance law herself if she'd known he’d come into possession of the trailer and the property. She hadn’t been magic at all. Neither had his father been. They understood the bare minimum. Sometimes he wondered what they had been told at the hospital. Whatever it was it had scared them. 

The nausea faded and left behind itself a powerful, possessing fear with no known antecedent. He went inside again and in the bedroom tried to surreptitiously make sure Graeme was breathing. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t asleep. He was in his own fear. The insects, which were real and not real, crawling over Lockett’s feet and inside his clothes even now, had swarmed all over-under the tangled blankets. He remembered another thing from the photocopies from the library. 

Lockett’s mother had died on the first of the month, and he had not yet cleaned up her things, which were still in her dresser and scattered about on the floor. They smelled like the laundry detergent she made at home with lavender oil and baking soda, and like her perfume, which she bought at the Wal-Mart in Lewiston on her bimonthly excursions there. She had been a profoundly depressed woman who needed to be busy at all times lest she succumb. She had been like this even before. Her family was in Coeur D’Alene and were never spoken of. As a child, before Montclair, Lockett had wondered, with suffocating fear, what he might have inherited from them. Then this fear was subsumed beneath the others. This inheritance was subsumed beneath the others. 

Her thick wool socks threadbare at the heel. Her nightgown. A purple and teal flannel shirt that he put on and then had to take off because in some horrible Pavlovian way the smell and the feeling of it instantly made him cry. Under the dresser, her hiking boots, which were caked with tannish mud, and her ancient Birkenstock sandals, rubber rotting away from the cork tread and leather straps. Lockett wondered, not for the first time, if she had killed herself. In the back of the sock drawer he found what he had been looking for: a half-full pharmacist’s bottle containing her preferred sedatives. 

He went to the bed and sat on the edge of it next to Graeme but far away. “Sit up,” he said. 

It was like a film moved away from Graeme’s eyes, like a lizard. “What?” 

“Sit up. Come on.” 

He was looking at the pill bottle in Lockett’s hand. It seemed to take him forever and the movement was almost mechanical. Like he had no idea how his body went together anymore. He was still blinking the film away. His skin was sallow and Lockett could feel the fever warmth off it like hot ceramic. His shirt was damp across the chest with sweat which was also in his hair at the temples and the brow and yet despite all this he was shivering with the violence of a stranded hiker. “What’s that,” he said. 

“Was my mom’s.” 

“What is it?” 

“Valium.” 

“Jesus Christ, Lockett.” 

“You’re going to pass up drugs?” 

This fell flat. Graeme’s mouth tightened. 

“It’ll help,” Lockett told him. “Just to help you sleep. It’ll be easier.” 

“What about you?” 

“I’ll be here awake keeping an eye on you.” 

Graeme’s face twisted, or flinched, like he’d been struck. Just let me, Lockett almost said. Let me take care of you. In the back of his throat, it tasted like rosewater; also like stomach acid. He tapped out one of the little white pills into his hand and fought to keep it steady. Graeme just looked at it, like he had been told it contained the meaning of life, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. 

“Please,” Lockett said, “Graeme, for the love of god.” 

“But — ”

“When you rest, I’ll have one and I’ll rest.” 

“You go first,” said Graeme stubbornly. His teeth were chattering. 

“I was just asleep.” 

“No you weren’t.” 

His eyes were bright and sharp. They moved quickly above Lockett’s head looking for something in the cobwebbed corners of the room. Neither brown nor green. No color at all in the darkness. Perhaps in his vision something was there. Like shadows on microfiche thrown before the scant light. 

“Just put it in your mouth,” Lockett said, tired of arguing, “and swallow it.” 

“How fast will it work?” 

“I don’t know. Probably pretty fast.” 

“And how long will it — ”

“Graeme, I don’t know.” 

He picked up the pill between two fingers but then he just cupped it in his own sweaty palm and looked at it. His hand was violently shaking. “Your mom,” he said. 

“Yeah. I told you I hadn’t talked to her in like almost ten years.” 

“Why?” 

“Why do you think.” 

He wondered if Graeme looked at everybody like his heart was breaking. Certainly he had hidden that expression from Wray. 

“She was a mountaineer,” Lockett told him. “She climbed all the peaks in Idaho over twelve thousand feet. There’s four of them, but then there are a couple in the elevens that are pretty close. Most of them are southeast of here in the Lost River Range. You have to drive around through part of Montana to get there, because you can't get across the Salmon River Mountains. She climbed them all before I was born and then she climbed them again when I was a kid. I think maybe she might’ve done them a third time but I guess there’s no way of knowing really.” 

“What about your dad.” 

“What about him.” 

“He let her do all that by herself?” 

“Oh, gladly, he did.” 

Lockett’s dad, who had also been named Lockett Schaff, but who went by his first initials, L.C., had nominally led fly fishing tours in the valley on contract for one of the tourist outfitters in Riggins. He was actually a drunk and that took up most of his time. Didn’t really do to tell Graeme about that. 

It had seemed to him when he was young that there wasn’t much to do in Western Idaho but drink. If you didn’t want that to be your life, you had to work at it, and you had to find some other hobby in which to drown your days and nights. Most people who had decided against alcohol, including Lockett himself, had weighed the options and thought meth or heroin might do the trick instead. 

“And there’s no way to get across the state?” 

“Not from here. You saw the mountains. Maybe there’s logging roads. My dad always said he knew them, but.” 

“Can’t depend on those anyway.” 

It was so utterly absurd a line of conversation and Lockett already so dead tired of it that he stopped it in its tracks. “Why are you stalling like this.” 

Graeme tightened his mouth, so that his lips turned purple-white, and then he fixed Lockett in the eyes. No color at all in the darkness. “You said we would come out here together and quit together,” he said. 

“Is that not what we’re doing.” _Or trying to do,_ he didn't say. 

“It isn’t fair.” 

“Why.” 

“It’s not — it feels like cheating. To get away from the consequences.” 

“So you think that you don’t deserve to get away from the consequences but that I do.” 

“That’s not — why do you always have to psychoanalyze me?” 

Because you’re very sick, Lockett almost told him. Because something is powerfully wrong with you and because you need help and everyone who cares about you knows it and tries to help but you don’t hear anything. Because you have deafened yourself to all loving sound. “I’m just — that’s literally what you said.” 

“It’s not what I said!” 

“I can't argue with you right now,” Lockett said. “I don't have the moral stamina.” 

“I’m not taking that pill.” 

“Fine. Suit yourself.” Lockett stood up. Everything cracked, everything spun. His heart rate jumped up another few BPM to roughly the speed of Cro-Mags’ _Age of Quarrel._ Standing up the stomach cramps which had possessed him now for days pulled apart and then together and tightened into a kind of separate being, like a fist. Something outside/inside himself with a jellyfish mind and one single muscle clenched tight as a clamshell. He had mentioned it to Alex when he'd gone around the house to pick up Graeme and she had told him, now you know roughly what it feels like to menstruate. “You might have seizures. Seeing things, hearing things. Maybe you would be delirious. Maybe you might die. Or you can sleep. So those are just your options.” 

Why do all my friendships incorporate standoffs, Lockett thought, looking down at Graeme in the bed. Is friendship what this is? Is it some kind of reluctant union of the desperate? That would be all too familiar… 

“You’ll take one later,” Graeme said. Not a question.

“Sure. I will.” 

“You’re okay now.” Not a question. 

“I’m — I mean, as okay as possible.” 

Graeme watched him. He brought his shaking hand to his mouth and then he took it away and showed Lockett that it was empty. Lockett felt a shocking immensity of relief, and then hated it. “I’m not checking under your tongue,” he said. “I’m trusting you.” 

For his part Graeme understood that this was foolish. He opened his mouth and lifted his tongue toward the roof of it like a patient at a dentist’s office. If he had hid the pill there anyway it was too dark to see. 

\--

“I don’t know, Billy,” Lockett said. Summer, nineteen eighty four. 

Montclair had crouched on the floor in the shed out back of the trailer on the edge of the woods to feel around for the trapdoor beneath which his mother kept hidden in shortbread tins most of the potent home-cooked methamphetamine she manufactured in a shipping container toward the back of the property. “She isn’t going to notice.” 

“She comes in here and counts — ”

“Can you do spells or not, idiot.” 

Now Lockett understood why he had been asked to partake in this operation. He had just turned sixteen. He hurt still when it rained and worse when it snowed. When he looked in the mirror now after getting out of the shower, usually by accident, he understood it was his body in the reflection. He had gone by his parents’ trailer drunk and crying and his father had come out with a shotgun, though to be fair he had also been drunk and crying. Montclair couldn’t really do magic, or not on purpose. Nobody had ever bothered to teach him anything. When he was upset it would explode, like popcorn jostling the lid off a saucepan, if popcorn alone could blow the saucepan lid through the roof, the insulation, and the corrugated tin siding of a double-wide. 

“I guess,” Lockett said. That he was better at magic than Montclair was a little-discussed point. He knelt on the floor beside him. Montclair had unearthed one of the tins from the crevasse and was checking to make sure it contained the necessary materials, which it did. Little opaque crystals, like shavings of rock candy. It was easy enough to do a spell — _Gemino_. It made an exact copy of the shortbread tin, which Lockett tucked away in the back of the secret pantry. If Eleanor Montclair ever opened it and tried to sell what was inside, she’d probably find out in some very difficult way that the copied drug itself was useless. If she even looked at the tin too closely she’d probably realize something was afoot, because Lockett wasn’t quite skillful enough with magic to make all the words and images quite right. Not to mention he was fixing like hell. So was Montclair. That was rather the point of this entire operation. 

They tucked the tin of meth — along with a few sweaters and long-abandoned schoolbooks as camouflage and padding — in Lockett’s backpack and got their bikes from under the Montclairs’ trailer, and then they went pedaling down the rocky dirt road toward town. There were these guys, Montclair had said, living in some kind of tent/tarp setup out Seven Devils Road, who had offered to trade. Heroin for meth. It seemed like a bad deal to Lockett, who had hated amphetamines since first sampling them behind the dumpsters in the middle school parking lot with Montclair three years previous. In the Before-time, as he thought about it, when he thought about it, as though on that night the apocalypse had been visited on literally anyone else besides himself. 

It was fine because it made living with Montclair and his mother not a temptation. He stayed away from the shipping container and the trapdoor in the shed except when Montclair had ideas. 

Eventually they left the road and hid their bikes in the brush and walked along the creek. The dark gathered closer and tighter pulling a kind of shadow closed like a veil against the mountains. Algae amidst the rocks, trout in the deep wells, mosquitos, a chorus of singing frogs and crickets. Montclair kicking stones. “Where is this place,” Lockett asked, whispering for some reason. 

“Around the bend,” said Montclair, but they went around another three bends before they came upon it. 

Being a werewolf didn’t give you any kind of special advantages in your human form. Sometimes Montclair pretended it did, but these unique attributes he claimed had existed in him even before. Lockett understood that nearly all his senses were the same, except for the new one, which was assorted abilities of measurement relating to cooking and injecting heroin, considering how he might get more heroin, and gauging how far out he was from physically requiring more heroin. Also, he thought he could smell things better sometimes, and he preferred rarer meat, though they so rarely could afford to eat meat that he had thought this might just be a fluke the few instances it had happened so far. As such, the bone-deep sense of imminent, paralyzing danger which leveled him at the sight of the lanterns and the tarps hung in the trees was one he was certain he had had before. He had had it, he thought he remembered, the night Montclair had asked him to come out into the canyon up Hailey Creek under the full moon, because he said he had found a deer skeleton. 

“You coming or what, Lock,” said Montclair. The flickering yellow light from the camp silhouetted him as though he were a theatrical villain delivering a monologue. 

“It creeps me out, man.” 

“Well if you don’t come, I’m not giving you any.” 

He went, and after a little while Lockett followed, as Montclair had known he would. He was fixing pretty bad. The fireflies and the lantern lights moving on the water. The residents of the encampment were sitting around a campfire in a rusted oil barrel, drinking yellowy moonshine out of glass jars. Montclair at some unknown junction had already ingratiated himself; “Who’s this, Billy,” someone said. Watching up at Lockett from a folding camp chair like the ones his father had kept in the back of the truck for when they went fishing together down the river toward Pollock in the tangled creeks and gulches. Eyes in the firelight which were pure black with no dimension or feeling. Didn’t remember a lot. Shards — puzzle pieces. Kept them broken up in a box. There was action happening on each piece, blurs of movement and of sound, but if he kept them broken up and pretended he didn’t know how to put them together, it was almost possible to forget that it had once been a complete memory. 

In the morning he got up. Pieces missing. Pieces missing from himself and from the memory. Montclair was gone and the people who lived there were passed out, sprawled with limbs akimbo under the trees like guerrilla militants killed in battle. He found his backpack and walked in the creekbed down to the edge of the road where he’d left his bike, which he walked back to Montclair’s mother’s place in the canyon. The boy himself was sitting there on the crooked rotting steps picking unthinkable grist out from his teeth with the filthy knife he kept in his pocket at all times. “There you are,” he said, a little bored. Not quite looking at Lockett struggling his bike up the road. 

“What’d you do with it,” Lockett said. It was all he had been thinking about, because it was all he could stand to think about, all the way back from the encampment. 

“What did I do with what?” 

“The drugs, you fucking idiot!” 

He could kind of remember the fix, and that it felt like being devoured. He knew how much these things were worth. The quantity of meth they’d stolen from Montclair’s mom was worth far more than enough heroin for two injections, which meant that Montclair had to have the rest of it. 

“She’ll _hear_ you,” hissed Montclair. But at least he put the tooth-picking knife away. 

Lockett dropped his bike in the dirt and the chassis jammed against a rock with a bright, echoing sound. “What did you do with it, Billy.” 

“You don’t remember?” 

Something like amusement was playing around Montclair’s blunt, graceless features. Lockett swallowed. He felt what remained of the fingernails on his right hand break the skin of his palm. 

“We took it all,” Montclair said. “You really don’t remember?” 

This, coupled with the expression, seemed like a taunt. Lockett’s nails unstuck from his skin. Magic pooled there in the cup of his palm, translucent, sparking. It felt like a kind of venom he drained from his body. Dangerous to hold. Dimly he remembered he had never fought with Montclair like this before. “I don’t remember,” he said. 

“I’m not surprised,” said Montclair absently, scuffing the toe of his worn sneakers against the steps. “You weren’t really yourself…” 

This was so comical that Lockett almost laughed. Might have, were he not holding the venom-magic carefully in his hand. Of course he was not himself. Survival of this nature required there be no self. Just some entity of unfixed form which could contort to fit certain niches, certain keyholes, without stress or pain. Which absorbed and erased. Which could sever its own poisoned parts. 

“Fuck off,” said Lockett. “What did you do with it.” 

“That’s the straight truth,” said Montclair. He stood to his full height, which was not much taller than Lockett, except he was on the stairs. “Actually, you should be asking yourself. It wasn't worth quite as much as I — ” 

Lockett threw the venom-magic underhanded up to him and it burst like an overfull water balloon over his face and upper chest. It was liquidish, or like an imagination of liquid, silvery and corrosive. Montclair screamed. It sounded really good to Lockett, like the best song ever, or like the sound of water, wind… He took a step forward and then another. The spell was crawling over Montclair’s face and neck like an army of silverfish which left reddish footprints. It had singed his hair and the neck of his t-shirt. “I’ll kill you if you ever do anything like that to me again,” Lockett told him, meaning it. “I’ll fucking kill you.” 

Had Montclair waited, or had something about that statement most enraged him? Something snapped. It snapped out of him. It was like his anger given form. Lockett saw it coming enough to throw his left arm up in front of his face, and then it drove him back toward the road and ran him over like a truck. For a moment it was all he could see, hovering above him, and it weighed a thousand pounds, but it had no color, and no shape, just was, like a piece of death — 

Eventually (indeterminable time) the weight lifted. The sky developed, then the trees. The screen door, which hadn’t fully shut in Montclair’s wake, buffeting in the wind. Finally a feeling which defied rational comprehension or description which entered, as a dose might, through his left arm. He turned his head to look at it where it was splayed out from him in the dust. The first thing he noticed was the fingers on his hand jumping reflexively inward toward his palm, because the nerves governing their movement had been damaged. A tiny tornado of electricity and magic had passed over him from wrist to elbow and flayed the skin and flesh from the bone like a cut of meat. 

He sat up and reached across himself with his right arm to cradle the left one against his chest. The quantity and color of the blood was startling. He arranged his grip such that he could hold most of the limb together. Skin and muscle peeled off it like unthinkable tentacles. Nested in the tangle of grist was the grey-white flash of bone. In his periphery he saw the old smoke-stained curtains moving in the trailer, which meant that inside Montclair was watching him. 

As such he could not provide the satisfaction of dying here. He knelt. Spinning. Blood poured to the ground, as though he’d let fall some dam, from the arm and from the places it had pooled in his shirt and the hollow of his stomach. He got one foot under him and then the other, stood, stumbled. 

Later he wondered why, as well as how. He walked the well-worn path from the Montclair compound toward the banks of the Salmon River, avoiding the worn-slippery exposed roots with a practiced step, even as, slowly, viewable reality condensed into a distant colorless pinhole accompanied by a roar of indistinct sound. The last bank was steep and he half-fell down it, sliding on his tailbone, and then his feet were wet, because his shoes were in the water. The river was running fast with the last snowmelt off the Sawtooths and across it on the northern bank the hills came shoving up out of the water, jagged and bare, washed with strange color bleached under the late-spring sun, intercut by drainage creeks with no names running off the high wooded spine of the mountains… 

He knelt in the water, knees dislodging flat, slippery stones, sediment, minnows. It was frigid cold and the blood billowed out around him like some algal cloud. He watched the seam where the ridge of the hills touched the sky. Dying, he thought, with a precious clarity. You are dying. Carefully he palmed handfuls of water over the wounded arm, not looking at it. He did this for a long time. He was thinking nothing at all. Just rinsing the blood away, waiting. Eventually he noticed there was no red stain in the water around him anymore and that was when he looked down and saw the wounds had closed and there were only scars. They were terrible scars, pink, knotted, woven in a kind of hex pattern from the heel of his hand to his elbow. But they were only scars. 

It was the first evidence he had ever been presented with, ever in his life, in sixteen years, that there was any purpose to his being alive, any real significance to his existence, to his consciousness, that anyone or anything noticed him for anything good, or that he might be capable of anything good. That it was perhaps important that he was alive. That it was perhaps important that he stayed alive. 

He waited in the water for a while until he thought he could stand without collapsing, and then he got to his feet. His clothes were soaked through with river water and blood so he took them off. He went back up to the trailer naked down the path through the woods. A foul smoke was sifting up from the shipping container, inside which Montclair’s mom was listening to Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” The boy himself was in the trailer watching reruns of Night Court on the fuzzy television, smoking a sizable blunt. The strains of “Hot for Teacher” were still audible upon the breeze, which was buffeting the just-ajar screen door against the rotting plywood frame. 

It was the first time Montclair had ever looked at him with surprise. For a minute he allowed himself to savor it. Standing on the threshold naked holding his blood- and river-soaked clothes over his crotch. Then he opened the fridge and chugged half a carton of expired orange juice, crouching in the stale-smelling cool and dingy fluorescent light. Montclair was still watching him, half-leant over the back of the couch. “You’re wasting it,” Lockett told him, between gulps. The blunt was burning out between Montclair’s fingers and the ash drooping to the stained tile floor. “Give it here.” 

He held out his hand, and when Montclair passed the tightly-rolled dutch over their fingers brushed. Lockett sensed something different in this friction, which he — much later —realized was a kind of equalization. Like oil and water uneasily changing places in a measuring cup. It would remain like this, now, for eight long years until the end, which already then was taking shape in the bruised young mind, crouching there in the trailer, orange juice dripping over his cheeks and neck, having brought himself back, not for the first time and not for the last, somehow, miraculously, from the dead. 

\--

Lockett sat there perhaps for hours in the armchair by the bed trying to remember what it felt like. Sort of the point was that it was ineffable. It made everything feel better even if there was no pain. Except perhaps there was always pain. Perhaps in the real world there was always pain. 

He tried thinking instead about what would have to be done with the trailer. All his mother’s things would have to be donated or otherwise gotten rid of. There were doctors’ offices and things where you could dispose of pills securely or otherwise you could flush them down the toilet. He would have to tear everything out of the yard because it had gone so overgrown, and he would have to redo the front walk, because the slate his father had put in years previous was heaving out of the thin soil. His mother had long since taken care of his father’s things, which was a small blessing. Perhaps there was a cache somewhere which might be rooted out with time. In the back of the closet, an unlabeled, collapsing cardboard box. Perhaps there was also one of these containing Lockett’s own things from his childhood. But it only took thinking this for the cravings to beset him again, like a cloud of wasps. 

When he had been contacted by the clerk in McCall who was responsible for executing magical inheritance law in Idaho, Adams, Valley, and Lemhi counties, he at first hadn’t thought much of it. Neither his mother’s death, the means by which remained unclear, nor the fact that the trailer and the property were now his by rights. The owl he received at the Den had been a form letter which explained if he did not claim the property in two weeks’ time it would be assayed and auctioned and he would be entitled to a cut of the proceeds. At first he thought of the money with a bleak, roaring joy. How much heroin is property on the Salmon River worth, he wondered. Watching it bubble in the spoon. When he came down he read the letter again. There was a phone number at the bottom of it, so he went to the block of payphones on Denny and put a quarter in and called. 

“Mid-Idaho Inheritance Office,” said a pleasant voice on the other end. “This is Deborah speaking.” 

“Hi,” said Lockett, “I got a letter — ” 

“Reference code?” 

“What?” 

“Reference code, bottom left corner.” 

“Um, J-A-S-five-one-S — ”

“Jane Alva Schaff, from Riggins. So you must be Lockett — Lockett Junior.” 

He was actually the third of his name, though he had never met the first. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me.” 

“I’m truly sorry for your loss.” 

“Um, thanks. I was just — I figured there had to be some mistake.” 

Deborah was quiet for a moment on the phone except for the rustling of papers. “Everything looks to be in order,” she said. “You were your mother’s only child, and you’re of age…” 

“They kicked me out when I was thirteen,” Lockett told her. Not mentioning the reason, because certainly it was on the paperwork. “I figured maybe that circumvented something.” 

“The only requirements for magical inheritance in the great state of Idaho are that you are the oldest legal child of the property owner and above the age of sixteen,” said Deborah, as though this were something she recited multiple times daily. “Your parents may have kicked you out but they did not legally disown you, and nor did you legally emancipate yourself. As a result you are still eligible.” 

Something tasted bad in the back of his throat. It was heavy. He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. 

“You don't have to claim the property,” Deborah said. She had softened her voice. “We can sell it at auction and mail you a check.” 

“How much do you think it’s worth?” 

“We sold property around there a few months ago for fifty thousand. The buyer would probably dispose of your mother’s trailer and build something new there. All the personal items would be donated. Your cut would probably be around thirty-five thousand dollars.” 

He leaned against the plexiglass wall of the booth. Something was trying to jump out of him. 

“But property value’s growing in Idaho County,” Deborah went on. “If you hang on to it a couple years before you sell it might be an even bigger payload. And if you sell it yourself we don’t need to take our cut, of course.” 

“I’m going to keep it,” Lockett told her. He was still deciding as it was coming out of his mouth. Part of him screamed in protest so loudly he could hear it ringing in his ears. “What do I need to do.” 

“Sign the third page of your letter and send it back. I’ll send another owl with the keys. You need a Portkey?” 

“I can Apparate.” 

“It’s yours as soon as I get that paper,” Deborah said. “Any other questions?” 

On the walk back to the Den he panicked and ran back to the phone to call her and take his offer back in favor of the thirty-five grand. But when he got there he found he didn’t have any more change. Back at the Den the owl Deborah’s office had sent with the initial paperwork was sitting in the eaves of the building, evidently having waited there throughout all his deliberation. He coaxed it in and up to his bedroom with a piece of cold bacon from the fridge, and then he signed the third page of the letter. 

_I, LOCKETT CUSTER SCHAFF III, being the FIRST AND ONLY child by blood of JANE ALVA SCHAFF and LOCKETT CUSTER SCHAFF JR., being of age and sound mind per standards delineated by the American Magical Congress and the Magical Congress of Idaho, and being possessed of magical ability per standards delineated by the American Magical Congress and the Magical Congress of Idaho, do hereby assume ownership of my MOTHER’S property at 51 SHADY ACRES LN RIGGINS ID 83549, and all resulting responsibilities of this binding magical contract._

Rolled it up sealed it tied it to the owl’s foot brought it outside and let it go before he could change his mind. Later that night he was lying in bed high listening to Joni Mitchell and Royce brought the same bird in again. In a little leather pouch it was carrying a single golden key and a facsimile of the document he had signed, which had been counter-signed by Deborah Richards, Clerk. 

“What’s that,” said Royce. 

Lockett was thinking about how it was funny to have been given a key when he already had one. Not that he really knew where it was and perhaps his mother had long since changed the locks. But somewhere he still had his key. His parents hadn’t taken it and neither had he given it to them. There had been some kind of mutual understanding that he wouldn’t use it and indeed he hadn’t. He moved it in his palm so it caught the light. It was just a normal key from a hardware store probably copied by Deborah in McCall in a batch of other keys to other dead people's property. The old key was on a keychain his mother had made with a letter L his father had whittled from driftwood as a boy. 

“What’s it a key to,” Royce said again. He went to the record player and turned down Joni Mitchell. 

This to Lockett was the greatest sin man could contemplate. It lifted his attention from the past. “Gates of hell,” he told Royce. 

“No, really.” 

“Really.” 

He leveled Royce in the eye with as much intensity as he could muster until Royce looked away. Not to be outdone Lockett just kept staring in the averted direction of Royce’s eyes until at last he left the room. 

He figured he could tell no one he was going there. It was going to be an entirely independent venture. If anyone knew he had passed up thirty-five thousand dollars for purposes so sentimental they would probably think he had been cursed or replaced by some shapeshifting monster. Except for Graeme, who would probably think it was a sign of something it wasn’t. Or at least, he was pretty sure it wasn’t. 

When he got to the trailer in the trees it was early morning. The pang of nostalgia like a physical blow. He went and unlocked the door and opened it. It was full of death. He opened all the windows and kept them open even when the wind started blowing the rain inside through the ripped screens onto the dusty windowpanes. The kitchen table stacked with papers he didn’t bother to read before he swept them into swallowing black garbage bags. He worked for a few hours before he was obliged to have a fix and then he laid in the bed watching the spreading stain of mold in the ceiling until he was certain he had laid there for years watching it grow from a spot into a kind of living canopy and the blankets which were still rumpled from his mother’s last sleep had become him and he had become the blankets — and then he got up and worked again. Rinse, repeat. Even here in the boonies it seemed the radio played all the singles from _Nevermind_ on an infinite loop. He went down to the river and took his shoes off and put his feet in. In the dregs of the high he didn’t feel the cold until he felt nothing. Made oatmeal for dinner alone but for the radio in the tiny kitchen. There was a little brown sugar fairly hardened to stone in the back of the cabinet and that the only sweetener. Under the sink, hidden behind the cleaning chemicals in a cardboard box, were a few dusty liquor bottles of varying age and contents. Vodka, tequila, bourbon, a little vial of Grand Marnier. Perhaps they had belonged to his father. He poured all the bottles down the drain and then he thought of Graeme. 

Graeme. G for Graeme. G for good. He was powerfully good. To remember their first meeting from the moth-devoured chair tattooed about the armrests with cigarette burns was difficult to reconcile with the diminished person in the bed. Perhaps Graeme had been fifteen. Laughing, big red windbreaker, U-Men shirt with a red wine stain, stumbling around in his untied Doc Martens, drunk of course, with Wray. Wray who also was good, before and after. There was something saintly about Wray now that he was dead. Lockett recalled him under the seemingly magnifying fluorescent lights of the registry, milling in the waiting room, both their eyes peeled for Montclair’s shadow in the stairwell from the street. “Is this normal,” Wray would say, explaining various aches and pains. To which Lockett would say, “I don’t know.” Which Wray had all along known he would say. He bit his lip and furrowed his brow and nodded a single tight, assured nod of his saintly head. The slow, pained pitch with which he folded his arms across his narrow chest in a kind of self-securing embrace. Like a straitjacket. Watching the door. Or in his cell, watching his feet, jaw locked down. Lockett knocked his own head back against the brick wall until he could hear the thunking sound inside and outside somewhat drowning out Montclair’s torrent of hyper-descriptive degenerate torture pornography. Then the moon. 

How utterly insane there are people like this in the world, Lockett had thought, watching them from the Marshall stacks sidestage at the Den. At first he had been jealous, and then he had identified this feeling as one endemic to Montclair which had been transferred to him through the long-ago contagion or perhaps simply by proximity. 

Graeme came up to him after a show. Perhaps this was the first time they spoke. It was after the Event, so it was after he knew. He looked like he’d been steeling himself with many beers. Wray was nowhere to be seen. “What’s that spell,” Graeme said. 

His voice was different than Lockett had been imagining. Later he realized perhaps it was notable he had been imagining any kind of voice at all. 

“Which one?” 

“Third song — sounds like a chainsaw.” 

“Well, I mean it’s a couple…” 

He put his hand out and Lockett put the neck of his guitar in it. Later, high, in his room, imagining the light and the rain outside, because there was no window, he thought about taking the joint from Montclair’s hand, already years ago then, in the world behind the brick wall he had built of heroin and grey matter… 

The person in the bed now was diminished, asleep. Dreaming: behind dewy violet-red lids the eyes moved quickly. Something inside trying to get out. Not much there beneath the sculptural folds of the lumpy duvet. Pale, red lips. His hair on the pillow. His eyelashes which seemed very dark. A Talking Heads lyric circling Lockett’s head: _your glassy eyes / your open mouth —_

His mind strayed. If they had a different kind of relationship, he would go lie down close to Graeme in the bed. Just close to him. He thought about touching Graeme’s back. His spine pressing against his t-shirt. Ribs, breath-bellows expanding and contracting, the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his waist, the little red-brown birthmark at the join of his neck and shoulder. Graeme liked to be touched. He moved in the direction of other warmth like a little flower. When he was drunk it was indiscriminate, and it seemed to get him in trouble more than he would say. Lockett didn’t like to be touched. That was sort of the problem. He had never had the kind of relationship with anyone where you would go lie down close to them in the bed. Not even quite sure how you would go about having that kind of relationship with anybody. After a while thinking of this he had to go to the bathroom to throw up. This time it worked. When he came back one of Graeme’s eyes was open. “Sorry,” Lockett said. 

“‘kay?” 

“I’m okay, yeah. Are you okay?” 

“Mmh,” said Graeme. He shifted his head on the pillow and his knees in the bed. His nose and his forehead scrunched up. “Have your pill and come lie down,” he said. His voice was soft and quick, words slurred together, like an admission at the edge of a dream. 

Unless he really hadn’t taken the Valium there was no way he was capable of legilimency in this state. And if he really hadn’t taken the Valium there was no way he’d be sleeping. And he wasn’t this good an actor. Lockett got up and found the pill bottle on the side table and before he could talk himself out of it went to the kitchen to take one with a glass of water. Then he went back to the bedroom and lay down far away on the other side of the bed. He felt his bones move and crack. The jellyfish brain thing low in his abdomen stretched out, luxuriating. Conducted as raw electricity through the thin mattress he could feel Graeme’s heart beating, heavy, a little quick. It was all entirely more than he had just been imagining. How miraculous to feel in such total awe of someone in such pathetic extremity. The profound, terrible delight that this person would dare such vulnerability in his presence. This person, who was such a petulant child in so many ways, except for the locus of his petulance, which was that no one in the world deserved to suffer, except for himself. 

Between them seemed a gulf of seismic proportions borne by geologic horror unimaginable. Just a great gaping insurmountable chasm in physical and emotional reality. Cold seeped up from it, like the bitter wind off a glacier. There would never be any closing this, he understood. Perhaps there could be a bridge over the gap for a while until the wind blew it all away. Perhaps that was all this was. Perhaps the wind even now was blowing stronger. He watched the little birthmark at the nape of Graeme's neck, the high ridge of his spine and the rivet-bolts of visible vertebrae above the collar of the t-shirt. He was curled in on himself, asleep again per the ponderous pace of his breath. Something fought the spiraling drowsiness of the Valium for a moment, rearing out of the silencing black depth like some unthinkable leviathan: a sudden blindsiding need-beyond-desire to clutch on to this for as long as he could stand. Until he fell. 

He’s a symbol, Lockett thought… as are you to him. A kind of wish-token, as are you to him. An imperfect, faulty replacement, as are you to him. The fleeting actualization of a thought-on-the-edge-of-sleep that perhaps you are a good person who deserves something good, and as such would know what to make of something good. As, of course, are you to him. 

What has any human being ever needed more than this? 

Eventually he found he couldn’t think about it. Just couldn’t. No longer processing. He thought of the cataclysmic floods which had created the knowable reality of Idaho and Washington at the end of the last ice age. Afterward, with the agent of ruin having swept down the valley of the Columbia and the old coulees to the sea, the landscape settled and became something new. 

Time passed in stretches and shifts of darkness and color and eventually he thought he woke up and Graeme was very close to him, breathing in time. His eyelashes were like the soft fan inside a mushroom. His knee touched Lockett’s under the blankets. 

\--

In the dream, not quite a dream, there was a little plain house without much furniture maybe up north like in Moscow. Graeme was perhaps a teacher. He didn’t drink anymore but the discontents of his youth remained with him. He had reconciled with his parents. They came sometimes and brought good coffee from Seattle. He was worried about them because he said they had worked too long in factories inhaling all that dust and exposed to all those spells. His mom coughed and his dad had to stay at home when they went out mushrooming. They had a secret place out near Viola whose precise location was undisclosable. On the way back they stopped in town for good bread. 

They drove down to Lewiston and out along the Snake River in the early morning to go fishing in the river’s deepest current-cut wells. They cut back through the low green hills into the Palouse and went home and cleaned the trout in the yard. Inside they put a tape on and read and then they played cards. It got dark and they went outside to pretend they knew constellations. “That’s the Great Salmon,” said Graeme. He reached up and connected four or five stars with his fingertip.

“You don’t know shit,” Lockett said. “You’re full of shit.” 

“I swear to god,” said Graeme, laughing. “Doesn’t it look like — that’s like a tail. Right?” 

“I mean I guess — ”

Standing close together in the darkness. Graeme's arm pressed against him from shoulder to elbow warm in the night chill through the soft old flannel. 

When he woke up in the morning Graeme was on the stoop playing guitar with his little thermos of coffee. “More on the stove,” he said, but it was like half a thimbleful. “How does this sound to you,” he said when Lockett came out with two fingers of cold coffee and a splash of milk in a pint glass. He played quickly through this strange dance stepping the fingers of his nail-bitten left hand elegantly up the neck of the guitar. 

Their neighbor was out across the street cutting the grass with a machete. Swiping it high and low with a muted musical whistling as it cut the still summer air. 

“Sounds like Wipers,” Lockett said. “Like the end of ‘Can This Be.’” 

“But not too much?” 

“Not too much. What’s it for?” 

“I don’t know. It’s not for anything.” 

They were both watching across the street now, like at the very pendulum of time. Graeme’s hands were poised just so above the strings of the guitar. Lockett was running the riff in his head cut through the machete and thought about moving Graeme’s left hand to a different chord shape — what might happen if he dared this creative or physical intercession. A set of parallel lines whose crossing this fantasy had not yet broached. 

Graeme stepped over it before he could: “You don’t even know what you want from me,” he said. 

“What?” 

“You heard me.” 

He was tuning the guitar now to drop D with a meticulous ear, brow tightly furrowed. The eerie twanging string sounds and the machete striking orchestrating the birdcalls and the breeze into its own strange music. 

“And I have — you know this. You’ve said it!” He looked up at Lockett, pausing in the tuning, striking atonal sounds against the strings. His dear soft eyes sharpening. “Nobody ever asks me what I want. So I just do what they want. So I’ll probably do what you want.” 

“Graeme, I didn’t mean — ” 

“It doesn't matter what you meant. It’s what you think.” He turned back to the guitar. “Maybe a little bit of projecting. Nobody ever asks you what you want either.” 

“I thought that maybe means we share something,” said Lockett, because it was a dream. 

“Does it?”

When the tuning was accomplished to his liking Graeme played the dancing riff again. In the new darker tuning it carried a strange and almost sinister nostalgia. The heavy delicacy of that music which was like the deep geologic past but also like a future-time as yet unseen through the fog. After a few quick runs he cut it slower by half. 

“You can make up your mind, at least,” he said. “Most of the time you have some resolve. You should probably use it.” 

“What if my resolve is dependent on your resolve.” 

He stopped his playing. No sound anymore in the world. Only that song anymore in the world. “I guess you’re fucked,” he said. 

“I don’t think I am.” 

“Why?” 

“Why do you always have to psychoanalyze me?” 

Graeme smiled his smile where his entire face changed shape. The rare true sober smile. Lockett’s heart moved. 

“It’s the same answer,” Graeme said. He turned back to the guitar and found the chord shape again. “Obviously we have the same answer.” 

The music filled the world and made the world. The shapes of it gouging away at the white space and the emptiness carving the rivers and the canyons and the mountains and the city and the fog and the rain and the world. It flowed together now with a little lilting distortion. “It’s good,” Lockett told him. “It sounds really good.” 

“It doesn’t exist yet,” said Graeme. 

“It doesn’t?” 

“It will.” 

\--

The dreams moved overhead like clouds. Once in a while in the atmospheric winds they showed the blue-milk moon or a burst of stars, and then they moved away again. The night pulled its cloak away from the world and with it the rain moved off southward through the Little Salmon valley. Lockett woke up around nine in the morning when the empty water bottle he’d left on the side table fell onto his shoulder. He stirred and shoved it away but quickly it rolled against him again this time with a kind of vengeful aggression. He elbowed it onto the floor but by then it was too late for sleep. He lay there in amorphous quasi-conscious frustration until somehow he felt the water bottle bump against him again. His eyes were salt-stuck and gritty and when he opened them into the interior darkness he noticed that he was alone in the bed and in the room, and that the water bottle was stood up at his side, swaying in little nudges like a seal or a dancing albatross, fairly defying the laws of physics. So Graeme must have done it. But by the silence he was alone in the trailer. 

Something somewhere sinking. Not altogether a new feeling as for days now he had felt intermittently every atom every cell every organ every inch of himself sinking. But there were no real depths to sinking. 

He got up and went in the kitchen. There was a note folded up like a kind of abstract bird perched akimbo on the table beside a bowl of rotting fruit. 

_It’s bewitched to bump you when you are dehydrated. I couldn’t get it to refill itself (too complicated vis a vis Laws of Elemental Transfiguration but not impossible so remind me to try it again some other time)._

Graeme’s handwriting was palsied, slanted. 

_Finite incantateum should work on it and the blinds too. They’re like fabric made of shadows. Otherwise try antiumbra_. _Light sensitivity is normal. I looked it up. It should go away. If you want you can wear the shadows and take them outside with you. They should go around you like a cape if I’ve made them right you can touch and move them like fabric._

_I’m so sorry. I guess I should’ve told you but I thought you knew you can’t help some people. I’m miles behind you. I’m so sorry._

He had signed it with a geographic scribble like a vague cursive G made of mountains. A kind of symbolic rendering of the Seattle horizon. Lockett crumpled the note in his fist and when he unclenched the fist there were just ashes inside it. At first he didn’t realize he had done the magic himself and thought it might have been something Graeme had done to the paper. 

Worst was that it did not even surprise him. He folded his arms over his chest and stood there for a while in the kitchen waiting for it to be not true. Now that the note was gone he could pretend that too had happened in a dream. He stood until he started to feel faint, and nothing changed. 

He put the teakettle on for oatmeal and refilled the water bottle and took two aspirin from the bottle on his mother’s dresser. Something was tugging at him behind the navel and he thought perhaps he might vomit again but didn’t think he could bear even the peripheral sight of himself in the bathroom mirror, so he went outside and walked the well-trod path through the woods to the river. Last spring’s floods had cut the bank high and steep and to get down to river’s edge required negotiating tangled sun-stripped roots and exposed stones slippery with rain and moss. Altogether a different arrangement of jungle gym than it had been when he was a child. He crouched in the water, barefoot, the cold like knives, and rinsed the ash from his hands until they were clean. 

When are you going to heal me like you did last time, he found himself thinking. He wondered if he should have dragged Graeme down to the water and dunked his head under in screaming baptism. The river was sluggish still and cobwebbed with ice in the shallow eddys. Would that it all were so simple. Most curses could not be broken at all. Those that could be would not shake off their yoke unless you could survive some altogether worse ordeal. Usually this was just reality, or otherwise it was truth. Sometimes it was the mirror-image version of oneself on the other side of the door. Evidently whatever Graeme had seen there had been altogether more terrifying than the alternative. 

Here, on the muddy bank of the Salmon River, hands numb, feet numb, Lockett was still waiting to see what his was. He was alone now, but perhaps that was another discontent of the assorted curses. Having always been alone he grasped with remarkable mastery the defensive and offensive wielding of the weapon which was aloneness. There was quite simply no way whatever was waiting on the other side for him could be worse than anything he had already survived. As such there was nothing left to fear. There was nothing left. There was only life. 

Back up and away in the trailer the kettle started whistling. He stood and climbed up the bank toward home again. 

\--

In October 1983, when Lockett was fifteen, there was an earthquake near the base of Borah Peak. At that time he had been living at the Montclairs’ compound out in the canyon just under a year. The event was reported in the papers as the most significant geologic occurrence ever to strike in the state of Idaho in recorded history. Two children died in Challis. The damage was extensive down the spine of Route 93 in the Thousand Springs Valley between the Lost River Range and the Pioneers. It had happened in the early morning, when Lockett was walking down to the grocery store, having not yet slept, to see what he could find in the dumpsters out back. He hadn’t felt anything, and this made him feel cheated. As though those waves of seismic energy should pass, by natural order, through the ancient layers of terrane and batholith and into the very spirit of every native son or daughter. Like another sort of geologic constant which could be shifted under extreme pressure. He thought about his mother, and he understood she would probably feel she had to climb Borah Peak again now that it was different. 

Over the next few days he continued to take the day-old papers from the dumpster behind the supermarket. The Boise paper quoted geologists who said the Big Lost River Valley fell and the range rose, leaving a ridge of pale white stone visible at the base of the peaks. A twenty-one mile northwesterly run of ruptures measuring up to fourteen feet here and there. Super-pressurized water had bubbled up out of the aquifer into which the rivers dissolved, building fountains and craters near the Chilly Buttes. Some of the black-and-white photographs he tore out of the paper and took home folded tightly in his pockets and hid them in a rip in the grubby mattress on the floor upon which he slept or in the cases formerly containing cassettes he had lost. He wasn’t quite sure why he hid them from Montclair. When they went to Seattle in 1986 and started squatting at the Den, he thought about putting some of the pictures up on the plywood walls in his room. He dug around through his meager things trying to remember which cassette case he had hidden them in but when he at last found them (in the case that should have housed his long-lost copy of the Slits’ _Cut_ ) he discovered water had gotten in at some point and all the newsprint had turned into a kind of solid petrified block, bearing abstract inky images, just gestural smears of black and gray, among the folds. 

\---

\--

-

II. 

Mount Saint Helens erupted when Graeme was ten years old. He was still living at home then, in the dark little A-frame in the trees outside Peshastin built over a century previous by his mother's ancestors, but it was near the end and he could tell even then that it was near the end. They heard the blast over breakfast at around 8:30 like some combined barrage of war-guns and thunder and went outside as though from the position in the little cabin in the valley they would be able to see anything. “Was that it,” said Graeme's mother, shading her eyes against the sun. “I think that was it," said his father. They magically tuned the radio in the shop to a Seattle news station they couldn’t normally pick up and listened to the report while they worked. The sky was clear and blue and it was warm for May. Graeme was doing some of his math workbooks at the kitchen table and eventually his mom called him outside and they watched the strange reaching cloud of ash come and settle over darkening the forest to near-night and scattering white charcoal marks over the windshield of the station wagon and in the wind-ravaged screens on the windows. They had gotten ash before when there was a forest fire in the Cascades, but that was difficult to appreciate because whenever it happened Graeme’s parents were on the knife-edge of stress Apparating in shifts day and night to the precious and remote groves of magically resonant wandwood in order to refresh and reinforce the fragile spells that kept the burn from eating up the family’s waning livelihood. 

This was a different ash which came from the inside of the earth, said Graeme's mom. She was holding the neck of her sweaty work t-shirt over her nose and mouth and gestured for Graeme to do the same. “You can touch it,” she said. She held her hand out and the little flakes fell in her palm as though they were snow and similarly they melted to white-black charcoal smears when they touched her skin. They sat on the porch together watching the ash fall breathing through their shirts and Graeme’s mom put her arm around his shoulders and the crinkling around her eyes seemed to be a crinkling of strange happiness. His father was still in the shed working on a rush order for one of their last customers and that night they described it to him while they ate dinner. He said he had heard on the radio that fifty-seven people had died. But death of course was difficult to reckon with as part of one’s actual reality when one had not experienced personally the adjacency of death. The way you could turn a corner and death was there. The same ash that had fallen on them in Peshastin had swept in lahars of vaporized glacial melt and mud down the rivers striking the bridges from their moorings and sweeping the doomed in their vehicles out with the turgid water toward the Columbia and the sea. And yet to them it had only seemed like snow. The forest very silent after that great sound. In the morning his father spoke on the phone with his wizarding contact at the logging company who kept an eye on the grove of ponderosa pines north of Spirit Lake and the news was bad. He spoke to Graeme’s mother in hushed tones and then they went out to the shed for a while. 

He did not actually go there himself until they visited on a field trip from Denny Academy when he was fourteen. Wray was with him and they sat together in the back of the bus on the way listening to Wire’s _Pink Flag_ on the cassette player, sharing headphones — _on the borders there’s movement — in the hills there is trouble —_ and watching the landscape sweep past, changing… 

They stood by the lake, which was full of dead trees bleached white by the sun like degraded, floating bones. Graeme wondered how many of them might have been wandwood trees had they not been flattened and swept from the hills by the force of the wind and the sound. Wray had snuck a cigarette in the breast pocket of the oversize flannel shirt he had started wearing every day, which was his dad’s. Covertly they shared it watching over the expanse of wreckage toward the great scar. 

“Did you hear it,” Wray asked him. 

“Yeah, like twenty times thunder.Then all this falling ash.” 

He had read that elsewhere in the state people wore dust masks for days against the hovering static cloud. In Peshastin they had been protected by the mountains. 

“My dad was called up for the National Guard to identify bodies,” Wray said, in the emotionless tone he relayed most information about his father. 

“Did he find any?” 

“Yeah, in trucks and stuff, he said. Mostly he said they identified by the plates on the cars because well, you know.” 

Graeme nodded as though he did know. 

On the way back they put on Mission of Burma’s _Signals, Calls, and Marches_ in the shared headphones, but neither of them was really listening, both because they had heard this record hundreds of times before, and because they were watching so intently at the woods outside the window, now suffused with some new understanding. As though in some time lapse film collapsing unfathomable generations watching as all sign of destruction faded with distance as soonish in the grand scale it would unrender itself even where it had happened. 

\--

The highway came out of the hills and into the flat grey-brown February fields, quilted patchwork with farm road seams between the old bones, smoothing out toward the crinkled-paper shadow of the mountains. Out of this nightmare-edge which was reality Graeme sat up, spinning. It had been bad before but he’d never actually come to in a ditch. Basically only metaphorical or psychic ditches before. He lay back down again and waited for it to go away, but it didn’t. Like the abandoned runt of some tougher beast who was and was not himself he had curled up in a grassy culvert out of the wind. Trucks on the road had woken him and kept him now from sleeping again. He was in his sweater and rain jacket, which would have been sufficient for Seattle, but it was colder here inland. In considering this he realized he did not know exactly where he was. 

There were strategies for keeping oneself from remembering what had happened several of which he had gathered from Lockett — 

The first strategy for keeping oneself from remembering what had happened was not to think back but only now and forward. Which was, he was lying by the side of the road in damp cotton clothes. To the west, where the road curved behind barns and wind-trap orchards and banks of strange pines, there were dark clouds moving. There was traffic on the road. And his head hurt. Possibly the most important thing to do was get home, but that would necessitate figuring out where he was. He didn’t think he had the strength to Apparate. The fields were lovely. A long milky un-color falling toward the clouds, the hills. Above just the barest threat of blue. 

What time was it? 

He got to his feet, vision wavering. At some unrecalled juncture he’d puked in the damp brown grass. The world seemed to pull in a few different directions and then set like a jello. He watched the cars while he caught his breath. There were a few Washington plates, one or two from Idaho, but a predominance of Oregon. So he supposed that was where he was. Then he supposed which way was west — toward the mountains — and set to walking. Just one foot in front of the other in the loose gravel at the side of the road. His mind wandered so he set to counting his steps, first mentally and then aloud, whispered under his breath. The farms he walked past were still and quiet with winter. Red barns like a splash of paint or blood upon the landscape. Here and there rangy thin animals eating and drinking at worn wooden troughs lifted their heads and watched him with round black eyes reflecting the profuse grey of that place. A woman out to fetch the mail greeted him with a suspicious incline of her head and he greeted her similarly and moved on again. He felt her watching him on her way up toward the house and he wondered if she would call the police. He checked his wallet, which was mercifully still in his back pocket, to find he had no photo identification and no money. A few Seattle bus tokens and the little laminated wish-card from Wray’s funeral with a tarot-looking illustration of St. Francis on the front side for devotional purposes. Pennies. A tear of paper from an old Crucia poster with a girl’s phone number on it. _Lauren. 206 525 1147._ Wray’s letter from eighteen months previous and a note Lockett had left with Mercedes at the house not two weeks ago: _Gone out to Idaho (my mom died). Here's my ticket for the Fugazi gig. You should bring Alex._

In short, nothing Transfigurable into a facsimile of a driver license. He tried anyway with his library card but he was too exhausted for the kind of focused work that would make it remotely believable. He was in process of attempting anyway when a truck pulled up just in front of him on the gravel shoulder of the highway. The driver had leant over to crank the passenger side window down so it was open when he came abreast of it. He was a tough looking sort in a leather shearling coat and a grizzled beard. A worn and wide long-sunburnt nose like a weathered sea captain. “Where you goin,” he said. 

“Town.” 

“Elgin?” 

“Whatever’s that way,” Graeme said, nodding west. 

“That’s Elgin.” 

“Sure, then.” 

“Hop in.” 

Graeme opened the door — a beer can fell out, sending a kind of electric bolt through him — and climbed in the cab of the truck. It smelled like old cigarettes. The driver pulled out again with a great rumbling of gravel on to the highway. The heat was cranked up against the chill, pouring an old burning smell into the interior, and Graeme pressed his cold hands near the vent to warm them. 

“Where you from?” said the driver. 

“Peshastin,” Graeme told him. The guy looked a little clueless as to the precise human geography of Washington State, so he clarified. “Near Leavenworth.” 

“Long way.” 

“Yeah.” 

“What you doing out here?” 

“Long story.” 

Hoping his body and literal language would say, I do not want to talk about it. I cannot yet talk about it. 

“You cold?” 

“I’m alright.” 

“There’s a blanket in the backseat,” said the guy, not buying it. “Maybe smells like the dog.” 

Graeme twisted toward the rear cab. Indeed there was an old moth-eaten Pendleton draped over a milk crate filled with junk — old rusted tools, jumper cables, an ice scraper, a can opener, for some reason — in the backseat. It did smell like a dog and was covered with dog hair and muddy footprints but he draped it around his shoulders. 

“Were you out at the lake?” the driver asked. 

Some sudden old fear not-quite-real came into his chest through his mouth in evil vapors. Like a demonic possession. The black void which was his memory shrunk and lightened as though manipulated in a darkroom. The driver was watching ahead at the road. Onwards toward the low blue mountains and the coming rain. 

“Sometimes they have parties out there is all,” said the driver. 

_Who’s they_ , Graeme thought, didn’t say. He sat back in the passenger seat and held the blanket more tightly around himself as some kind of protective shield. In his periphery he could distinguish the driver watching him. His wrist clasped against his chest through the blanket and his coat and sweater picked up his heart rate beginning to race itself toward uncertain ends. The shivering like some deep and endless expression of bones now and not from cold any longer. 

Don’t let it come back, he was thinking. Dear god, don’t let it come back… 

“You live out here,” Graeme asked the driver. 

“Sure,” said the guy. “Lostine. You would’ve come through it if you was coming from Lake Wallowa.” 

He really wanted to talk about that fucking lake. Graeme tightened his jaw until it hurt. There was nothing in the bare horizon-touching February fields to count. Endless, riotous nothing. A landscape as drawn by a child in paint-box watercolors. Mountains, fields, clouds, a windbreak of dark pines, the smeary red blotch of a distant barn through the rain-spattered windshield. 

“Made it a long way on your feet,” said the guy. 

“I didn’t — I wasn’t there.” 

Knowing as he said it the precise inflection of the moon on the water. The ragged shape of the moon like a chewed-off fingernail and the light of it like a pale fluorescent neon grey let through from another world. His entire mind throwing the walls up against this thing. Desperately leaning its entire weight against the thin plywood whilst whatever was inside threatened to seep, semisolid, oozing, through the cracks. 

“Suit yourself.” 

_I will fucking suit myself_ , Graeme thought. There was real, powerful magic in how sometimes you could wish something into being even if it wasn’t true. You could want something to be real enough that it was real. You could want something to be false enough that it was false. In believing a lie it could become the truth. You had to be very careful because if you employed this strategy excessively simple incongruities might dissemble one’s entire reality. Not unlike those very useful curses which might easily backfire upon their caster. 

The trick was to think only now and forward. “What’s in Elgin,” Graeme asked. 

“Not much. A Wal-Mart, Agway, mom and pop soda fountains and all that.” 

“There a liquor store?” 

“Won’t be nothing open at this hour except maybe Wallaby’s.” 

“Wallaby’s.” 

“Hideous pub.” 

“Sounds alright to me.” 

The driver laughed. “You’re heading to hell in a handcart kid.” 

Graeme bit his lip on, _Sure am_. 

“I get it,” the guy went on. “Known a lot of thrill seekers. One might say the country makes them. It also makes the kind of people who maybe want to die.” 

“Not me,” said Graeme lamely to the window. His breath frosting white on the rain-blotted glass. 

“Suit your fuckin self kid. Can't say I know how you made it so far under your own power. Maybe it’s all that LSD catching up with me. Maybe you weren’t never there after all. But I see you. And I think you ought to be careful with what you’re courting. It’s closer to you than you think.” 

He was standing, shoes on, in the the lake — the current moved, icebound, February-slow. Across the deep black water in the moonlight the low terraced colorless hills which featured eastern Washington and Oregon and a swath of western Idaho slipped toward the stars like some great dredge pile. Behind him a bonfire crackling in an oildrum, laughter. Sparks bursting toward the heavy dark sky. 

The road was rising toward the crest of a hill. Filthy snow tangled with dead brush and farm refuse in the culverts. “You can just let me out here,” Graeme said. 

“Don’t be silly. It’s right over the rise.” 

“Then I can walk from here. Let me out.” 

The truck rattled in the loose gravel at the side of the road. Graeme tried the door before the truck had even stopped moving but it was locked. A chill matching the cold clamminess of his damp clothing passed down his spine starting in the back of his neck and radiating through the entire psychic railway of his fried nerves. He put magic in his voice without thinking. “Let me out.” 

“Cool your fuckin jets,” said the guy. There was magic in his voice too. The chill under all Graeme’s sodden skin now like another electric subcutaneous layer between the inside and the outside. “Cool it,” he said again. “Sit.” 

Graeme turned away from the door and sat back in the big bucket seat. Every cell in his body outside the reach of the spell screaming and screaming in his ears. When the driver turned off the truck’s engine it seemed that he cut all sound out of the world sharply with a well-honed knife. 

“Look at me,” said the driver. Graeme did, his own magic resisting the movement, so that turning his head felt like further tightening the lid of a jar. The driver’s eyes set like strange jewels in the sun-wrinkled face were a bleary cloud-blown blue. “You got somewhere to go,” he asked. 

“Yes.” 

“Where?” 

“Home.” 

Alex would know. The moment she saw him she would know. He could see her face suddenly just behind his eyes. 

“Really?” said the driver. 

The spell in his voice was not particularly powerful and if Graeme had had more of his wits about him he might’ve bucked it. But, “I don’t know,” he had to say. 

“You got someone who can help you?” 

The twist of his brain connected to his tongue screaming the answer. _YES, OVER THE SNAKE RIVER AND THE MOUNTAINS_ … He forced something else instead through the spell, like pushing two mismatched puzzle pieces together, gritted-teeth words scraped out from his ragged will: “I don’t need help.” 

The driver ignored this but for an illegible twist in the blue eyes. He seemed to have known Graeme would say it. “It’s a shame no one loves you enough — or maybe they love you too much to tell it to you straight,” he said. “So I’ll tell you. You’re heading somewhere you can’t imagine. You’ll know it when you get there but not a minute before. It isn't hell — it isn’t even death. It’s a horror on earth of your own making. You hear me?” 

Graeme hardly heard the words — only that the magic had left the voice. “I hear you,” he said, inching his hand back toward the door handle.

The driver must have noticed his escape attempt. The spell returned to his speech with a vengeance. “Tell me what I said back to me.” 

His own voice tugged out of him hand-over-hand like the end of a rope coiled in his stomach. “I’m heading for hell on earth of my own making.” 

“Are you going to do anything about it?” 

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

It hurt not to say it. Almost like not breathing. Tears sprung to his eyes so he squeezed them closed. He sealed his hand tightly over his mouth and said it into his hand. He wasn't even entirely sure what it was. 

“Everything you stave off is going to get worse, you know that?” 

“Yes.” 

“So why do you keep — ”

Graeme was experienced enough with magic that these sorts of things — highs and lows of power with emotion — rarely happened to him anymore. It felt like blood rushing into his hands. He thought of the door and it burst open. He thought of the ropes of the driver’s spell and they frayed apart. He practically threw himself out the door, stumbling in the loose gravel, and cast his hand out behind him. The door slammed shut. His heart was in his throat. The driver was watching him through the window and for a moment Graeme thought perhaps he would be expected to duel. Instead he heard the engine roar on again. The gravel shifted under the tires as the driver pulled out onto the road. 

He watched the truck go until it had disappeared over the rise. The power drained out of him into the ground through the soles of his feet. There was nothing left to do but keep walking over the hills toward town. He had lost his place counting his footsteps so he was obliged to start over again from one. 

\--

On the fated day, he came home from the practice space, where he went sometimes to hide under the guise of writing songs, and Lockett was sitting on the stoop of the house on 13th Avenue looking like death warmed over. The rain had stuck his lank hair across his face and he was watching into the middle distance as though something there had hypnotized him until Graeme closed the gate behind himself and the latch shut with a metallic sound. Something in Lockett’s eye developed like a polaroid photograph. “Alex told me you’d be by,” he said a little apologetically. His voice sounded forced out through a stopped-up valve. 

He approached this person — his friend — on the stairs like one might a wounded animal who could level some kind of deadly hoof-kick in its suffering throes. “Here I am,” he said. The thing which was developing in Lockett’s eye was throwing the shadow forms of conviction and fear. _Fuck_ , Graeme thought, conclusively. “How was Idaho.” 

“Fine,” Lockett said. Graeme sat next to him on the stoop and felt he was holding himself incredibly still as though letting go a single strand would lead to his disintegration. “House was a mild disaster.” 

“Is town like how you remember it?” 

When he knew Lockett wanted to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about, he talked around it for as long as he could. Sometimes Lockett went with it until he gave up. The scant instances upon which this had happened had inspired Graeme to attempt distraction over and over again. 

“More, like, whitewater rafting outfitters…” 

“Is there even whitewater on the Salmon River.” 

“No.” 

Graeme laughed. It was a hollow-ish sound in the afternoon quietude. 

“And there’s — the church where my mom was going. In a trailer. A church in a trailer. She used to be like, organized religion is a scam… but they buried her and everything. So I can’t complain.” 

There were different kinds of death, Graeme understood. So it followed that there were different kinds of grief for different kinds of death. 

“You didn’t go to the funeral?”

“It happened before I even knew. If they hadn’t had magical records I wouldn’t’ve even known she was dead.” 

The dreaded silence settled low as the quickly-moving February clouds and brooded. Graeme combed his mind desperately for something else to say but Lockett was quicker. “Listen,” he said. Like he hated saying it. 

Graeme covered his mouth with his hand and looked desperately away across the overgrown yard toward the sidewalk as though something or someone coming up from Pine might stop that which was coming before it came. 

“No pressure on you at all,” Lockett went on. “Even though it was your idea. But I thought I would just tell you. If your offer still stands.” 

“My offer of — ”

“I had my last shot last night. I don’t have any more. I’m not buying any more. And I got rid of all the booze in the house. Probably it was all, like, vinegar, anyway. So if you want to come with me.” 

“To Idaho.” 

The corner of Lockett’s mouth quirked. “Yeah,” he said, “to Idaho.” 

“Okay,” said Graeme. It came from his heart, so he meant it, but not necessarily with the full force of intellectual certainty. “Let me go in and get some things.” 

“Are you serious?” 

He was already on his feet. His hands were shaking so he put them in his pockets. Lockett was looking up at him with an expression of pure, aching disbelief in the dark eyes and the tangled brow. 

“I mean it,” Graeme told him. Even as that thorny, toothy, longing, draining something which lived and breathed with him set to twisting. “I’ll be right back.” 

Inside Alex was on the couch reading Sylvia Plath. She looked up at the sound of Graeme in the door. Her face was writ with one of those difficult expressions that was far easier to just ignore. “Take some cookies,” she said. 

“What?” 

“There’s cookies. Take some with you.” 

It was definitely not worth either of their time to pretend he didn't know what she was talking about, but he tried anyway. 

“Take some,” Alex said again, slower, like to a child, folding the book facedown on her lap. Sylvia’s portrait stared out of it toward Graeme expectantly. “Take some with you, when you go to Idaho.” 

He didn't ask how Alex knew. He went in the room where he’d been staying, which was Wray’s room and still full of Wray’s things, and put some random items from the floor in a canvas bag; a t-shirt to sleep in, a book (Brautigan’s _Revenge of the Lawn_ ), a toothbrush, two pairs of underwear which were possibly clean. When he came out again Alex was in the kitchen putting some of the cookies in a plastic bag. 

“What kind are they,” Graeme asked her. 

“Thumbprint ones with blackberry jelly.” 

Memory buckled his knees. He turned back toward the living room. 

“It’s not going to work, Graeme,” Alex told him, “unless you really want it to.” 

Again, there was no use in pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Did he tell you about the plan.” 

“I inferred it from the fact that he looks like a reanimated zombie version of himself. And that you look like a hunted deer.” 

She passed him the bag of cookies. They were still warm. In some of the wells at the edge of the jelly he could see the ridges and whorls of her thumbprint having broken the fragile dough apart. “Alex,” he tried. Couldn’t quite look at her so he looked at the cookies instead. How miraculous that they were still warm. How miraculous that she just did these things, liked doing these things, liked making things that made people happy as much as she liked making things that made people afraid, and that the things she made to make people happy actually made people happy… 

“Alex,” he tried again. “I don’t know…” 

“I don’t know either,” she said. “Do you really want to stop?” 

“Of course, yes,” he told her, before he knew if it was true or not. “I do,” he said, just spitballing now, “yes.” 

He dared to look at Alex now. She was biting both her lips together tightly, shrinking her mouth to just a line. Her eyes were like a cup-spilling-over with some feeling not yet named except in certain annals of history written by great losers of decisive wars and subsequently burned. 

“If you really want to stop,” Alex said. It seemed she was saying this instead of something else she wanted to say but could not articulate. “Then you’ll be able to stop.” 

“I really want to stop,” Graeme told her. 

“Then you’ll be able to stop.” 

It almost felt like he was speaking around some huge hideous knot of roots and hair and stones and mineral deposits excavated from drainpipes and he understood she was speaking around some similar terrible weight, choking, silencing… In lieu of any further attempting, Alex embraced him tightly. He could feel her nose against his neck and that her eyes were tightly closed. She was trying to use this hug to get around the laws of physics and tell him whatever that thing was she couldn’t say, but they were laws of physics for a reason. Eventually she tried something, and she seemed to hate saying it, because it was just a platitude: “See you when you get back.” 

“See you soon,” Graeme told her. 

“Yeah, see you soon.” 

Kicking himself all the way to the door. Not even really sure about what. Outside Lockett was pacing up and down the walk. He looked up in a kind of hopeful but pained surprise. “Alex made cookies,” Graeme told him inanely. 

“Are you ready?” 

“Yeah. How do you want to do it?” 

“I can side-along you.” 

“You sure?” 

Lockett’s face tightened. It seemed he understood that in every moment that passed Graeme’s second-guessing doubled down on itself. He strode back up the path with such searing intent Graeme took an affronted step back. But Lockett only grabbed his wrist, then they fell out of the city, like the map had been picked up and shaken, fell through nothingness, around the curvature of the continent… 

The spark and flare of Lockett's imperfect magic shoved them back dizzyingly into space. He let go of Graeme's wrist but he had been holding so tightly that Graeme still felt it. The woods were dark and still. Rain, birdcalls. Deadfall brought down in the January winds quietly rotting. The mountains were a low bare brown rising out of the long valley and all around as a kind of violent tinnitus the river roared. The house was a single-wide trailer in a windbreak of pines. The siding had slipped here and there from the skeleton showing the decaying insulation and the plot of land which constituted a yard was overgrown with long grasses and half-wild shrubs. Sometime long ago it had been lovingly tended judging by the neat brick and slate edging but the perennials had gone feral. Everything gnawed by deer in this hungry country. A trellis of store-bought fencing lined the space under the trailer but small animals had torn their way through to nest there in the cold season. Their cryptic footprints were in the frozen mud and the rags of snow scattered at the base of the trees. 

“This is where you grew up,” said Graeme. Though looking at it this fact was rather obvious, not least because there was a mailbox crookedly attached to the siding near the door which said _SCHAFF_ on it. 

“We could go by ye olde Montclair compound later maybe. It’s out around the bend.” 

“You ever been back?” 

“Not since we left. Don’t know if Eleanor’s still there.” 

“What would she do if she saw you?” 

“Get the shotgun…” 

They went inside. The screen door had been secured by a confident and unskilled handyman and hung fairly off the hinges and warping inside the frame. Inside smelled like old paper and cleaning products and the woody incense Lockett sometimes burned in his room at the Den. Four large black contractor’s garbage bags had been stacked in a corner of the kitchen. “It was full of junk,” Lockett explained. “It isn’t so bad now.” 

“It’s nice.” 

“You don’t have to lie.” 

“I’m not. It’s nice.” 

There was only one other room, which contained a rumpled king-size bed and a moldy armchair, a dresser strewn with a woman’s old makeup and jewelry, scattered clothing on the floor, some of it Lockett’s. “Where’d you sleep when you were a kid,” Graeme asked. 

“We had like, a screen that divided the room,” Lockett said. He sat down heavily on the bed, knees cracking. “I just had a little bed where the dresser is now. I got too tall for it, you know, right before, um, it happened, but my parents were broke, so they moved like a milk crate with a pillow on it to the end of the bed so I could stretch my legs out.” 

Graeme had turned his face toward the dresser sometime in the middle of this admission to hide his expression from Lockett. Evidently his mother had been a reliable consumer of Mary Kay powder foundation in bronze one. “That’s ingenuity,” he said. 

“They were good. They tried.” 

“When did your dad — ”

“I was fifteen. Found out in the local paper. He fell off a boat drunk like Percy Shelley.” 

“Who?”

Graeme watched in the mirror on the dresser as Lockett collapsed on his back in the bed as though this was a physical blow. “Graeme… oh my god…”

“What!” 

This was familiar, comfortable, usual, as though none of it at all were strange. Graeme went and knelt next to Lockett on the edge of the bed, careful to keep his boots from the white duvet. Lockett cracked his left eye just open and studied him as though to see if he were serious. Then he closed it again. 

“He was a poet. He was married to Mary Shelley who wrote _Frankenstein_. Maybe you know his most famous poem, _I met a traveler from an antique land_ …” 

“Nope.” 

“What about, _he is not dead, he doth not sleep, he hath awakened from the dream of life_ …” 

“How do you know stuff like this?” 

Lockett ignored that. “Shelley died when he was twenty-nine,” he said. “All his friends cremated him on the beach but his heart didn't burn. It was calcified, because of all his drinking. So Mary kept it with her in her writing desk and stuff and carried it with her for the rest of her life.” 

Sometimes he told stories like this that seemed a little pointed. Maybe he didn’t even know he was doing it. Graeme sat on the edge of the bed and picked at his boot laces. Once he’d taken his shoes off he started on Lockett’s but Lockett sat up quickly, nearly at the first feeling of his touch, to do it himself. Sitting close to him Graeme could see the web of fine wrinkles at the corner of his eye deepening, almost fluctuating, like breathing. 

“What do we do now,” Graeme asked him. 

“We don’t do anything at all. We wait.” 

\--

Wallaby’s Pub was not only the singular liquor-licensed establishment open at eight in the morning on a Sunday in Elgin, Oregon. It was the only establishment of any kind open at eight in the morning on a Sunday in Elgin, Oregon. When Graeme shouldered in the heavy door into the darkness the lone other patron — an elderly woman nursing a beer in a back corner — didn’t even look up. The bartender finished the page he was scanning in _Guns & Ammo _before he acknowledged Graeme’s presence. “What can I do you for.” 

“Just gin please. Straight.”

The bartender allotted a few glugs of a foul-looking well gin into a chipped rocks glass with deep mauve lipstick smeared around the rim. He pushed this across the counter toward Graeme and went back to _Guns & Ammo. _

It looked a little greasy in the glass, like an oilslick, as though the simple presence of the substance distorted reality. His consciousness felt pulling down into it. Some great drain measuredly syphoning layers off. He raised a lipstick-less stretch of the glass to his mouth and tried to drain it without tasting it, with middling success. At the sound of the empty glass upon the bar again the bartender refilled it without looking up from the magazine. He drained this too and waited for it to lift him from the earth. It was around this juncture he recalled he had no money. The _Guns & Ammo _magazine seemed to imply this probably wouldn’t be taken lightly, but he was past caring. He signaled the bartender again. Another gin metastasized through his blood, astringent, cold juniper evaporating. Then he got up and went toward the back to piss. 

The single unisex restroom (two urinals, two stalls) was so dark that it took him a few moments looking at himself in the dingy mirror before he could digest that this terrible image on the wall was his own reflection. The face narrowed in the ordeal. Darkness around and inside the eyes shot through with blood. The white to his face seemed a kind of death mask, hewn whole cloth from grey-veined marble except for the swollen red blood spot in his lower lip. His body like some kind of protective case his mind necessitated to move around in the world with such evil whims — a tool it used sometimes and then dropped. Smashed up near to pieces in vengeance at its sequestration. What he at first thought was dirt smeared at the join of his neck and jaw he found to be a yellow-black bruise of uncertain provenance when he wet his fingers and tried to wipe it away. 

_What’s wrong in your mind? What broke? When? Can you fix it before it kills you?_

The man in the truck had said it would get worse even than this. Perhaps he knew from personal experience. It was difficult to imagine what worse could possibly be. There was a kind of buffer or threshold to his eschatological imagination and the gin had closed the door there to keep him from the depths of it. He thought he needed at least one more to move the door up another step to the level at which he would no longer feel the need or even possess the ability to ask himself these searching questions. But if he went back out there he would have to pay, and he had no money. 

He locked himself in the stall furthest from the door. There was no seat on the bare, filthy toilet bowl. He closed his eyes and focused as much of his scattershot consciousness as could be corralled into the idea of home. There was a bottle of gin under his bed — Wray’s bed. Alex and Mercedes probably did not think he had noticed they had gotten rid of or hid all the other booze in the house. After a certain point this habit required conniving. It's a good thing you’re a Capricorn, Wray would’ve said. 

It’s not a problem until I have to hide it, he remembered thinking once, while Wray was still alive. But when he had gotten there he had simply shifted the goalposts. Eventually he had stopped thinking of goalposts at all. Now, presumably, he was off the field entirely. Just running and running at nothing into the darkness. 

Snap crackle pop. Space snatched him up by the back of the neck like a lioness with cubs. 

\--

“It was just this little a-frame in the woods,” Graeme told Lockett. “Where I grew up. Bigger than this. But only just.” 

At the kitchen table. They had heated up chicken noodle soup from ancient dusty cans unearthed in the back of the pantry. “We probably won’t notice if we get botulism,” Lockett said. He lit the stove too slowly with a match and the flame jumped out toward him and nearly set his shirt on fire. After that Graeme said, “Why don’t I do the cooking.” 

That was an indeterminable time ago now… the hours seeped through the window into the growing dusk. 

“When was your last time,” Lockett said. He had folded his arms on the table and rested his forehead there. What was left over of his soup had congealed in the bottom of the chipped china bowl. Graeme watched his back rise and fall. The deep, focused breaths breathed when you were thinking about them carefully. 

“This morning when I got up,” he told Lockett. 

“This morning.” 

“Yeah — like maybe eight thirty.” 

“How do you get away with that?” 

“Put it in coffee. No one notices.” 

Not even Lockett in the past had noticed, or if he had he hadn’t said anything. He shifted his forehead in the cradle of his arms. He always had dark circles under his eyes but now they seemed deeper and more purple. His face a kind of green-gray skim-milk un-color, drawn tightly, hollow under the high bones. “Tell me more about the house,” he said. 

“My mom’s great-great-grandparents built it in 1848 when they got out here from Western Massachusetts. There was no good lumber back east after 1820 maybe… they sold everything they had to come out here, just because of rumors.” In Graeme’s childhood when the bad times had come upon the Sugarbush family again for the nth time in its not-so-illustrious history his mother had been fond of relating the tales of her ancestors’ most abject desperation. Allegedly there had been an unprepared-for winter they had scraped through narrowly in the frozen house in the frozen foothills by eating bark and grass. The moral of this story had been that what had been survived once could usually be survived again. But in the 1850s the Sugarbushes hadn’t had to contend with a bevy of highly restrictive regulations on wandwood manufacturing, nor with aggressive corporatized clear-cutting, nor with climate change, nor with volcanic activity. The forest never not raining or burning. The house, which was dark, dusty, drafty, ceiling leaked, dead animals in the fireplace flue sometimes, settling creaks in the night, never any silence, a bat inside, once, an old cigarette smell that wouldn’t go away, omnipresent, omnipotent rain, home, seemed to hold all this inside it. An entire family history of clawing for slipping footholds caught like dust in the high rafters. 

Wouldn’t do to tell Lockett all this. 

“It was dark,” he said instead. “Always mold. They didn’t get power up there until my mom was a kid and sometimes it just stopped working for no reason. My parents were always out in the shed in the back working. And we saw bears a lot, especially in the morning, through the back window.” 

“Sounds charming.” 

“Sometimes it was.” 

He picked up the soup things to bring them to the sink. It was in process of this he noticed the shaking in his hands. The spoon jostling against the chipped ceramic rhythmically. He put the dishes down on the counter as though doing so might alleviate the problem but he found he could see it now just looking at his empty hands in the half-light. It was a just-so fear- or anger-tremor as would sometimes come upon him in speaking to Montclair — the way one’s body sometimes endeavors to express something one cannot say. Lockett sat up and slid lower in his chair. Graeme could feel the eyes on his back. “There you go,” Lockett said. “It has been about eight hours, hasn’t it.” 

The clock on the stove said 4:18. “Is that what it said in your photocopies?” 

“Six to eight hours, yeah.” 

There had been something else in the room with them for a while, he was realizing. It was an un-shadow, a disturbance of light. The vagueness of movement in the corner of his eye or else some imperfect prismatic reflection of the car headlights on the road through the window. It had moved around him already a few times in circles that were tightening. He wasn’t entirely sure what would happen once it touched him. 

“How do you feel,” Lockett said. 

“Okay,” Graeme lied. “You?” 

Lockett’s mouth quirked. “Okay,” he lied. 

They waited at the table. Eventually Lockett got up and paced back and forth across the stained tile floor in a worn-down groove where this same forced march had evidently been practiced by one or both of his parents. Graeme put his head down on the table in the cradle of his folded arms, counting breaths. Once in a while he was obliged to look up and around the room for the moving shadow. Usually he didn’t see it but he could tell it was there. There was a strange humming coming from the corners where the ceiling had leaked variant ombre hues of mold through the flat roof. The sound of it was like an eardrum ringing but worse, almost sour, honed to a precisely calibrated pitch that only dogs and the suffering could hear… 

Eventually he lifted his head and found it was pure dark and Lockett wasn’t in the kitchen anymore. He had gone into the bedroom and curled up like a wounded animal at the very edge of the bed, where he wasn’t asleep but was pretending to be. His skin was so sallow and collapsed over the bones that he would have looked like a corpse about to undergo last rites had his fist not been clenched so tightly in the blankets. His eyes were squeezed closed such that his entire face was crunched up and twisted. For a while Graeme sat in the armchair watching at the door to the kitchen waiting for the humming to seep through. Some of the shadow was with them already in the bedroom moving just at the corner of his vision. He had the idea that if he managed to see it in motion it would be forced to freeze in place and he could destroy it. But it must have been smarter than him. Eventually he went and lay down on the other side of the bed, close enough to the window to feel the draft. His heart rate felt ratcheted up by a crank. He laid the palms of both hands over his chest and felt the troubled pace of it vibrate his whole body. After a while he realized the reason his hands were hurting was because at some unremembered juncture he had picked and chewed most of the skin away from his nails. 

Didn’t sleep. Shook and sweat all night in the big bed and beside him through the electric conductor of the sheets and mattress he felt Lockett doing the same. At dawn he got up and knelt in the tiny bathroom before the toilet like some penitent monk praying towards an amorphous end to the mortal coil until at last he threw up. Relief lasted about thirty seconds of blissful un-nausea leant up against the tiny shower box with his forehead pressed to the cool glass, during which time Lockett came in and threw up too. Graeme fought himself to his feet to hold Lockett’s hair back and nearly capsized to the pink tiles and the filthy rag rug again, vision bleeding black, spinning… His mind collected slowly. The pointillist pattern of the beads of Lockett’s unsleep-sweat darkening the fabric of his t-shirt. “Alright?” he asked, letting go Lockett’s hair. There were fine goosebumps standing up on the back of his neck. 

Lockett sat back on his heels. He was breathing hard through his mouth as though he'd run some great distance. “Yeah,” he said, “for like, five minutes maybe…” 

Graeme joined him on the floor again, leaning up against the cabinet under the sink, and put the back of his hand against Lockett’s forehead. It was hot but it was hot in the room and everything was hot so he couldn’t tell if it meant anything. To wit, “Your hand’s really hot,” Lockett said. 

Eventually Graeme got up and laid face down on the cold tile floor in the kitchen. In the bathroom he heard Lockett throwing up again and his own stomach twisted sympathetically. With his eyes closed the world spun less and the nausea dissipated somewhat and he could almost ignore the inevitability of the sneaking moving shadow thing which was in the room with him moving here and there just outside his vision. Eventually he felt it kneel on his back and seep in through his skin. It moved like an evil drug through the blood and lymph and spinal fluid and at last it reached where it had been heading all along which was the center of his brain which manipulated fear. Whatever dials in there were quickly cranked to eleven with a great drone of wailing feedback. His body reacted as it might react to some altogether more physical wound, tuning in tightly on itself. He turned onto his side and tucked in his knees and his forehead until they nearly met. The ragged shallow pace of his own breath and heartbeat which skipped terrifying eternity skips. He pressed the heels of his hands tightly into his eyes and even the fireworks and fractals of no nameable color seemed to generate decadent apocalypse visions into the darkness. 

It was too beyond logic to even wonder at the logic. If he could have considered the fear he would have understood it had no object. It just was. Like some massive continental weather system generating violent winds and tornadoes and roaring shocks of lightning engineered by movements of pressures and invisible atmospheric hands crafting and pulling apart the black-cotton clouds. Because he could not consider the fear it seemed to have every object. As though every living and nonliving thing had put an atom of itself into this fear. Every blade of grass, every television… After approximately twelve eternities in hell he found a sore spot in his lip and pressed his teeth into it as tightly as he could to keep from making a sound, not even entirely sure what kind of sound it would be. Perhaps it would be like if vomiting came from the brain instead of from the gut. An expression of desperate self-emptying, entirely wishful. 

It was almost like grief, except grief was cold. Grief too moved over you and waited and waited and waited… Like grief there was no end that could be conceived of on the human scale of time. It came very quickly into your life and you couldn't chase it out again. You had to let it seep out of its own volition and like rainwater through limestone that could take millennia of infinitesimal movement through the waterlogged aquifers… 

Footsteps on the tile floor. Dear god but it had come back now with something else to take or give. As in the nuclear holocaust drills he vaguely recalled from his early childhood he covered the back of his neck with his latticed hands to shield his face with his arms. A great siren of silence screaming in his ears. It touched him — _it touched him_ — at the wrist and elbow and his eyes flew open in complete blindsided terror and yet it was only Lockett. Whatever expression was on Graeme’s face made him stumble back a little, tripping over his own bare feet. He knelt, slowly, knees cracking, hands out, empty, shaking, close to Graeme but far away. His presence didn’t so much disperse the fear as it distracted from it enough that logical reality might be considered. Carefully as though the movement might shatter the bones Graeme took his hands away from his face. It felt like beginning to untie the tight tangled knot which was his entire body. 

“What happened,” Lockett said. His hand hovered as though he had reached to touch Graeme’s hair and thought better of it. It rested at last at Graeme’s shoulder; the muscle and the bone jumped in surprise at being touched. Lockett’s hand was cold. He passed it down the back blade of Graeme’s shoulder to the nape of his neck and back again. 

“Nothing,” Graeme told him, “nothing, nothing…” 

“Your mouth’s bleeding.” 

Graeme touched his lower lip. His fingers came away smeared bright, shocking red. He looked desperately to Lockett as though for an answer but he was staring vacantly across the room, carefully seeking words. When he found them he turned back to Graeme with a familiar expression that hurt to look at. “Did you get down here by yourself,” he asked. 

“What?” 

“Do you remember — did you fall or something.” 

“I just lay down here,” Graeme said, teeth clattering, “because it was cold.” 

“Are you hot?” 

“Not anymore.” 

“I’m trying to — if you had a seizure we have to take you to the hospital.” 

“I didn’t have a seizure!” 

“Then what happened to your lip?” 

“I bit through it.” 

“Just, like, by yourself?” 

“Yes, Lockett, oh my god.” 

A shadow came and took me over, he almost said. After all Lockett certainly understood this kind of thing. A shadow came and took me over and held me down and I couldn’t move. A shadow made of fear. 

“Can you sit up?” Lockett asked. “Want a glass of water?” 

He was still rubbing Graeme’s back just between his shoulder and his spine. It took all the intent of Graeme’s remaining wits not to lean into the touch. Don’t stop, he thought about saying. I just need this and I will be okay. He didn’t say anything. It took him a moment to orient himself enough to get his hands under him and sit up and when he did the world kind of slid off to the left. A moment of weightless, vertiginous blackness. When things developed he realized Lockett was holding him up. “Did you black out.” 

“Sort of.” 

“Can you sit up yourself now?” 

_Yes but for god’s sake don’t let go —_

“Yeah, I’ve got it.” 

Lockett let him go and stood. His knees cracked. Graeme touched his mouth. There was no more blood but he could feel the tender, broken warm spot against his fingers. The fear had started to circle around him again, like a cloud of gnats. Lockett came back with a glass of water from the sink, which he pressed into Graeme’s shaking hands. When he raised it to his mouth the glass battered his teeth, sending the worst conceivable sounds like knives through his skull. “Do you think you can eat,” Lockett said. 

The merest thought of food was like a battering ram to the gut. “God, no.” 

“Me neither. But maybe we should try.” 

There were saltine crackers in the cupboard, and they tried, sitting there together on the floor. Graeme started picking at his destroyed fingernails and Lockett pulled his hands apart, like squabbling siblings, over and over again. They tread well-trodden desire paths already worn into the tiles to the bathroom to throw up and to the bed to lie down, more like shifting between in-between-states of consciousness than sleeping. Time apparently moved even as every moment seemed like a lightyear’s travel in space toward another unfriendly planet and those uncertain ends. The bed, the dreams, the insects, at last the sedative Lockett produced from his mother’s things. And then day and night was one long un-day. One of those kinds of places where nothing was there. Only the moon in the bowl of the fields. 

In the night the haze cleared off like clouds in the high atmospheric winds. Graeme’s entire consciousness tuned back in like fuzzy violins on the AM dial and he opened his eyes to find he had moved in sleep very close to Lockett in the big moon-shot bed. He was asleep still on his back with the scarred forearm thrown over his chest and his face turned toward the window. At this angle the bones of his jaw and cheek and brow seemed arrayed sculpturally. Heretofore unseen freckles and acne scars now visible in the soft blue light which caught the brittle streak of grey hair over his ear and turned it bright silver as exposed wire. His mouth was just open and his breathing the only sound but for the wind making experimental beats in the trees and the trailer’s decaying siding. 

Graeme lay there for a long time not thinking much at all, watching the breath-movement of Lockett’s chest in the wide neck of his black t-shirt, lulled to a kind of trance by the silence and the last of the Valium. The drug like a slowly lengthening leash keeping the dogs at bay for now. Lockett’s face turned toward him finally, towards dawn by the distant positioning of stars above the hills in the high window. He must have been deeper than dreaming because under the mauve lids his eyes weren’t moving. Perfect painterly stillness — shapes, shadows, colors. In the slack red mouth his stale breath was incredibly soft. 

What’s in there, Graeme thought. Trying to look through the closed eyes. How did you build your brain like this? It possessed him suddenly that he could find out, though the necessary legilimency was an Article E spell and Lockett would be entitled to sue him and in court would probably be awarded privileges of retaliation, if Graeme remembered the three class periods’ worth of the Magical Law seminar he’d managed to sit through sixth year at Denny. Lockett’s magic was fine, sparked and smoked and crackled a little, probably would hurt, like a bad migraine, like something reaching in through the soft bit at the back of his skull, digging the protective case out there, like a cat with a mouse’s guts. In Graeme’s mind, in the rusty file cabinets exploding stacks of shuffled sunbleached silverfish-eaten paper, Lockett would probably find things that horrified even him. This itself probably one of those things. _You’ve been watching him sleep for hours_ …

The sedative chased this thought away. Itself like the minotaur driving the seekers from the maze. He was not-quite-thinking. Perhaps he closed his eyes again. In another unmeasure of time — seconds or hours — the world fell away — the house fell away, and then the world. The hills, the trees… only the water and the wind-sound, now. Above in the last of full night were an unthinkable quantity of stars. He understood without looking that there was an eternity of water around them. There were no maps to this place any more, and wherever they had come from was gone. They were going somewhere which could not yet be seen, or known, or named. But the night was warm, and the wind was low, and the sea was still for now, lapping at the side of the little boat like a dog, and by the stars, like a pointillist light-painting, like needles thrust through a sheet of black paper, he understood — thank god — the current was true… 

He couldn't stand to wake Lockett up to show him. The stillness like a rime of ice which must not be broken. He followed instead some directive from somewhere else — sometime else — and reached across Lockett’s chest for his hand. This was the one with WOLF tattooed across the knuckles. Very old text and patterns across the back of his hand illegible now with years. The scars Montclair had given him faded out in jagged points just past the sloping monadnock bone of his wrist. Fine pale hairs standing just so in the cool night. At the very last something stopped Graeme from sliding his own fingers between Lockett’s and matching them up together. His hand just hovered there, trembling, as though something foreign had frozen it in place. 

That something had a name and face just beyond his reach, around another bend inside the great maze. It developed slowly like an image from a polaroid camera — form out of space. The bright pale eyes and dishwater hair. The wound at his hairline that never really closed taped shut with butterfly bandages. The memory wrung something inside him like a wet cloth. Wray. 

A long time ago in the summer — his ribs hurt — they reached for one another across the bed — and he could feel Wray’s heart beating, or otherwise his own heart, his own heart and Wray’s heart just offset, one unending echoing beat passed between them, and now one of them had stopped forever… 

Thus slipped the dogs of war. Like in the beginning when he would wake up and it would take him a few moments to remember what he was doing in Wray’s bed. What was the muffled conversation outside. Why he had been sleeping in the afternoon. Why his mouth tasted like he’d been crying. Even after the funeral when he would wake up and remember the things Lockett had told him: it hurt Wray to play guitar, toward the end. There was a bezoar somewhere in his things in case something evil happened to Graeme. Montclair had been threatening all their lives to torment Wray for months. At home he would lie in the moving morning light pressing his consciousness into this knowledge where it hurt the most, pressing deeper, his brain inventing conversations, histories, picking at the unhealed scab, scarring down to the bone. Then he would get up and make a cup of coffee and put some bourbon in it and set on the daily process of forgetting. 

It wouldn't — couldn't — be like that anymore after this. There would be no more erasing. It must be lived. 

He was drowning other things, he knew. These too must be lived. He was drowning any kind of critical consideration of his relationship with Lockett, which was obviously influenced. It was pretty pathetic that existing in his mind required friendship with a worse impending trainwreck as a means of distracting himself from his own impending trainwreck. But Lockett had been abandoned by his parents as a child, mauled, violated, infected, used; had doggedly survived at any cost, against all odds; he had good reasons to self-medicate; he had more to forget. It was almost illogical that he possessed the wherewithal to quit. That he did was incontrovertible proof of the kind of person he was, which was some altogether better kind than Graeme. 

Lockett, in his sleep, sighed, as though he were listening. He was dreaming now; under the heavy dark lids his eyes were moving. Twenty minutes ago ensconced in the cocoon of the drug Graeme might have found it beautiful. The thought came upon him again this time with knives: _You’ve been watching him sleep for hours._

It was followed quickly and closely by its self-analytic discontents: 

_You replaced Wray with him. It was easy — it was too easy. It was easier than breathing. It just happened. It was easier than it would’ve been for Wray, if it was you who died._

_As such does it not stand to reason this is what you wanted from Wray all along? To watch him sleep, to hold him? For him to hold you? Is that what you want now? You nearly did it. Maybe you should’ve done it. You would have to do it now. There’ll be no other time again when he might let you._

He watched Lockett’s collar and the hollow of his neck in his shirt, trying to count his slow sleep-heavy breaths. He was distracted by his own, which were rapid, as though he had been running in a nightmare. His brain couldn’t stop itself. If tripped it would keep running on and on til the end of the world. 

This was the precise locus where something (anything) else was required. A drink. At the sheer thought it felt like every internal organ — heart, stomach, lungs, liver — threw themselves against the imprisoning case of ribs with a wet, bloody _thunk_. 

_You were never quite good enough for Wray. You didn’t even know what he was dealing with in the end. Lockett had to tell you, because Wray didn’t trust you. He knew you would react emotionally and you would have nothing productive to say. Even if he had told you what would you have done?_

_If you could have kept him alive you might’ve for your own selfish ends. Just to keep from being alone. Just like Montclair._

_Everyone thought you followed him around like a little lost puppy. Now everyone thinks you do just the same to Lockett because it’s all you’re good for. When you go get him on the full moon morning he hates the sight of you. Have you noticed that?_

_Thunk_ , went Graeme’s brain against the walls of his skull. It slid down the inside grating like fingernails against the chromatic gates of hell. He felt like the mutated experimenter in a science fiction film, ensnared in the transformative power of his own evil creation, begging to be put down. 

_You have to do it now because there’ll be no other time again when he might let you. But you’ll have to explain yourself to him when he wakes up. You know he doesn’t need or want your comfort._

_And even if he did — he’s sick. Who knows how long there is? Could you stand that again? Putting yourself in the way of that again means you want it again. You love being hurt. You love being a martyr. It’s all connected. The sick thing is that it doesn’t come from anywhere. It just is._

_Is this what you wanted all along? Were you in love with Wray? It would explain a lot. Are you in love —_

He sat up. The world slid off to the left again and he would’ve fallen over on top of Lockett but for his hand braced between them in the blankets. 

_Ah, you were. Your avoidance means you were. Means you are. You wouldn’t flinch from a place that didn’t hurt._

_No one and nothing is ever enough for you. No one’s love is ever enough. You always need more. And you take from people until they have nothing left. Don’t you get it?_

His vision developed blurrily, the room rendered as though through a Vaseline-smeared lens. Later he realized this was because he was crying. Lockett was still asleep. He shifted, pulling the duvet cover closer to himself, lips unsticking with a tiny sound just audible in the silent room. Part of Graeme’s heart calved off like a melting iceberg. 

_Why did you even come here,_ that thing said. But it was in and of his own mind, that thing. Sometimes it felt like an _Imperius_ curse he had put on himself. _You knew how this would end. You knew it from the second you offered it…_

Shakily got to his feet at the edge of the bed. Every bone vibrating against its adjacents with such fervor he was obliged to clench his jaw tightly shut to keep his clattering teeth from waking Lockett. 

Here’s why it felt like a curse: he didn’t want to do it. Desperately he didn’t want to. But he did anyway. 

\--

In Seattle there was no one home in the little yellow gingerbread house on Thirteenth Avenue. Graeme almost knelt on the muddy-footprinted hardwoods and kissed them. Instead he went to the kitchen and got a chipped jam jar from the cupboard and retired to Wray’s room to polish off the gin in the bottle under the bed. It was raining and the scant gray light moved through the bamboo tree outside the window and shifted in bright rectangles across the bed and the floor. Eventually he laid down and something on the pillow crinkled under his head. It was a roll of fine parchment sealed with a bit of red wax. 

_Dear Graeme I do hope this finds you well. Long story short and cutting to the chase with the quickness we’ve come into a mighty need for a guitar player. And I hope that might be you._

_You know Flora and I wrote the bones of a record in your parents’ tent out there in the dark woods. Well we’ve finished it now here in London successfully without killing each other. It sounds better than I think I thought it would — more the Raincoats than the Slits… or maybe the better reference is, I know you’ve heard the Breeders record_ Pod _… We filed for divorce from the HGs’ record label and went for a real indie — we’re going to be Hellfire Club #004. Debating a September release as I write. Then a tour. Which brings us to:_

_Flor is going to play bass and I am going to play keys. It'll be a few months on the road at least. You are the first person I thought of who would want to or maybe even could manage to play the guitar. I know you have your band and your friends and your family and your life. Don't want to take you away from that. But I’d be remiss — I’d regret it — if I didn't ask._

_We’re at 92 Belgrade in Shacklewell in London. Floo’s online if you want to stick your head in. Otherwise write us._

_Yours — Imani_

He sat up. Head spun. The decision, like so many of late, not even really made. Wray’s old backpacking pack was slouched on the floor in the back of his closet and Graeme dug it out, pulled out Wray’s tent, tarp, sleeping bag, the little camp stove and the ridiculous packaged meals, tin cup, Earl Grey teabags, threw it all on the bed, turned the pack upside down and shook it. Dust and coins, trash, scraps, a single perfect red maple leaf. Then he went through the closet and shoved things in. Wray’s suit with the big lapels, a few muted flannels, the less ostentatious oversize trousers, Wray’s Wipers shirt, his Terrormancy shirt (the feeling which passed through Graeme at the sight of the name and the pattern was too large and debilitating to be classified as a pang; somehow he forced himself through it), Dinosaur Jr. shirt, U-Men shirt, another suit (the trim navy blue one with the bloodstain), the most egregious acid-wash jeans, last, just not-thinking from somewhere inside his brain without a name and with no memories, the pink silk slip dress Wray had worn onstage once either on a dare or because he wanted to be Kurt Cobain, back when his band was called Skid Row. Touching the soft fabric sent a chill running like very cold water down his spine to the floor. 

He turned next to his own clothing scattered about the room and took those necessities, at which point he was obliged to shove everything he'd already packed deeper into the backpack with his foot. He laid on the floor fishing around under the bed but all the bottles rolling around there were empty. Instead he took an eighth of pot from the jar in Alex’s room and a sheaf of her rolling papers, and then he went looking for his toothbrush, but he’d left it in Idaho. One more pair of boots. Then the guitars, struggling to zip his own and Wray’s into the same soft case, spare strings, picks, couldn't find his capo so he took Alex’s, which was in the same drawer in her dresser with Wray’s old two-way mirrors, so he took one; his cassette player and a handful of necessary tapes jammed in the front pocket of the backpack, another Richard Brautigan book ( _In Watermelon Sugar_ ), a last look at the house, breathing, outside the rain coming down harder than usual now, patterning and distorting the sky’s reflection in the puddle under the pines… 

Threw a handful of green powder in the fireplace and for a moment just watched it burn. He dared the universe to stop him. Then he begged it to stop him. When nothing happened he stepped into the fire. 

\---

\--

-

III.

Alex ignored the first, second, and third rings of the doorbell, because she was in her room in the back of the first-floor apartment in the yellow gingerbread house on thirteenth avenue working on a song. In fact, she didn’t so much ignore the first and second rings as her mind, executing its most complex creative gymnastics, negotiated the muted buzzing into the tones coming out of her guitar, which she’d tuned down to an uncertain register and blanketed in distortion spells. The third ring arrived in a lull of semi-silence between chords, but she ignored it. Less easily massaged into her playing were the subsequent flurry of brusque knocks just offset with the metronome beat ticking somewhere in her innermost ear. 

_It’s probably Lockett and Graeme will get it,_ she thought, before the lingering painful squall of noise she’d engineered from the instrument reminded her of reality. 

_Fuck._

She got up, blood screaming in needles through her legs as she unfolded them. Rolled her neck, cracked her shoulders. Outside it was raining. She wasn’t quite certain what time she had started working, and what time it was now. Whoever was out front was still knocking, and just in case she made a little spell cupped in her hand behind her back. 

Lockett Schaff was at the door, as she might have suspected. As though nothing had happened. Like a Victorian penitent he had taken off the hat he wore against the rain and was nervously wringing it in two hands. She had been furious with him for about twenty-four hours and though that as most of the sharpest feeling had blunted with days and mental processing the unfamiliar distortion of embarrassment and sympathy to his face set to sharpening it again. He looked as though last time he’d come over he’d set something on fire. Which, Alex supposed, was not far from the truth. “He’s not here,” she told him, letting some of that sharpness into her voice, before the door was even fully open. 

His voice sounded embarrassed too. “Okay — I figured — um — ”

His hands worrying his hat. Alex didn’t think he was being intentionally pathetic, but still she hated that it had worked. She let the defensive spell dissolve from her cupped hand and swung the door wide, letting the cold, clammy February air in. “How about you come inside.” 

“Are you sure — ”

“Would I say it if — just come in. You’re letting the warm out.” 

He came in and she closed the door behind him with finitude. Thought about locking it so he couldn’t escape a difficult conversation if they had to have one. But he had crouched on the floor to take his boots off, which indicated he didn’t intend to run off anywhere in a hurry. Under his omnipresent beat-up leather jacket he was wearing a faded purple and teal flannel shirt, which was more color than she’d ever seen him in before. His eyes were a dark umber-shot green, Alex noticed when he stood. She didn’t think she’d ever noticed before that there was any color to them besides dark and bloodshot. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he told her, evidently just for something to say. 

Alex hadn’t realized it was Valentine’s Day. “You too,” she said. 

“Got any plans?” 

“I guess I’ll go out and get some chocolates.” 

“Sounds alright.” 

He was smiling which was just a quirking of the corner of his mouth. “So you did it,” Alex said.

“I mean, yeah, for now.” 

“You don’t look so — tired, anymore.” 

“Thanks, I guess.” 

“Put a tape on or something,” she told him, backing toward the kitchen. “Want tea?” 

“Sure.” 

“I take mine with cream and sugar.” 

“I will too then if it’s okay.” 

In the kitchen Alex put the kettle on. She’d turned on the oven earlier with intent to bake something — and to keep the house warm, as her parents had done in her childhood on the rez — but the song had consumed her. It still did then in the kitchen and she thought about asking Lockett if he wanted to come back some other time, or if he wanted to jam with her, not that there was another guitar in the house for him to use, because Graeme had taken both his and Wray’s, and Mercedes had taken her bass back to her parents’ house, and Alex’s Casio was a piece of shit, not that she knew if Lockett could or wanted to play keys… But then in the living room he put on Alex’s cassette of Aretha Franklin’s _Soul ’69,_ which she’d had since she was thirteen years old. _I got the blues for the highway…_

She leaned in the kitchen doorframe and watched him. He had taken off the leather jacket and thrown it over the back of the couch. Having put the tape on he was still excavating through the milk crate containing her cassettes. “You heard this one before,” she asked him. 

“Heard some of the songs before but not the whole thing. You have so many soul tapes.” 

“They’re all from when I was a kid. Used to walk down the hill from school on weekends. There was this record shop — they just had soul, R&B, blues…” 

“How’d you end up playing noise guitar.” 

“Wanted to do those huge feelings but uglier. Plus I have a lineage, like a cultural directive, because Native people invented distortion.” 

“What? Really?” 

“Link Wray. ‘Rumble,’ 1958. He punched holes in his amp to make it fuzz. Look it up.” 

“D’you have a cassette?” 

“I have a 45 somewhere but I lost the adaptor.” 

“I have one; I’ll bring it over.” 

The kettle boiled and Alex went back in the kitchen and made tea in two chipped mugs. When she came back into the living room Lockett had found the Link Wray 45 and put it up by the record player so as not to forget about it. “The only instrumental ever to be banned from the radio,” Alex told him. 

“Was Wray named after — ”

“I asked him once and he said he didn’t know. He might’ve been. I think he just decided he was.” She didn’t want to talk about Wray; she knew that would lead to even worse and even more inevitable lines of conversation. “But you — I mean, I know you love Joni Mitchell, and you play noise guitar too.” 

“It’s not worth even trying to play like Joni,” said Lockett. He was blushing a little. “But also I was too lazy to learn the tunings.” 

“So you didn’t learn any tunings at all.” 

“No, you know, I barely learned standard tuning at all…” 

Alex laughed. “We should be friends,” she said. “Why haven’t we been friends.” 

Lockett seemed to finally realize she wasn’t going to chew him out. His shoulders moved slowly away from his ears. “I don’t know,” he said. “Bullshit politics, like everything else.” 

“Wray was like — protective of us.” 

“He has a big shadow for someone so little. Like he had a big one even when he was alive.” 

“It’s bigger now,” Alex told him for some reason. “I can feel him with me sometimes. And Graeme says — ” she instantly regretted saying his name — “well Graeme says a lot.” 

“He does,” said Lockett. He had looked away from her at the mention of Graeme’s name to study the creases and lines in the palms of his hand. The scoring old scars cutting out of the sleeves of his flannel shirt just to the base of his palm and the tickle of old ink there, casting strokes and splotches like spilled paint. 

“He went to London,” Alex said. She was trying for gentle but could not entirely chase the bitterness from her voice. Lockett flinched. The sight and feeling of defensive movement from someone whom to date had seemed nigh indestructible twisted something inside her still tighter. “London, England. To tour with Imani Rose and Flora St. James’s new band.” 

Lockett nodded a few times contemplatively to indicate his slow processing of this new information. Eventually he rested his forehead in his hand propped up by the elbow against his knee. “Fuck,” he said. 

“Yeah.” 

_It looks like it makes you happy just to see me cry_ , Aretha belted from the tape player. A little too pointed. Alex focused every iota of her magic into fast-forwarding to the next track but the interruption was more jarring than the music itself had been. And besides, it was the end of the side. “Maybe we should put something else on,” she told Lockett, ejecting the tape and tucking it back in the case. 

He filtered aimlessly through the stack of tapes he’d unearthed from Alex’s milk crate but nothing seemed to move him. Alternatively maybe select among them moved him too much. He hesitated over a Mission of Burma tape and then moved on again. “More in Wray’s room,” Alex said. 

“I’m not going in there,” Lockett said, as though she referred to the Labyrinth or the mouth of hell. 

“As well you shouldn’t. It’s a mess.” 

Eventually Alex did because she had something in mind — Spacemen 3’s _Playing With Fire_. Evidently Graeme had thought about taking it, because it was on top of the dresser marring the perfect symmetry of the shrine of Wray’s things which was still there — old first-edition detective novels from Goodwill, stacks of 1970s National Geographics, his two most prized cassettes which were not to be touched ( _Surfer Rosa_ and _Isn’t Anything_ ), candlesticks dripping dusty black wax… The window was open, and the room was cold and smelled like rain. Imani’s letter was still on the pillow, where Alex had put it and where Graeme had found it. Not for the first time Alex wondered, if she had known what was in it, if she would have burned it. 

When she had first come home and worked out what had happened, she had been about to throw the last remaining Floo powder in the fireplace and go to London herself to excoriate Imani and Flora and bodily drag Graeme back though the flames kicking and screaming. Then she had been livid with Lockett, and briefly with herself. The anger had returned at last to its customary locus in moments of emotional exhaustion for the past several months, which was Wray, just for dying. Then back to herself, for the perceived selfishness. And at last it shifted to where she thought it truly belonged, which was with Graeme. She could have gone to get him, or she could have written to Imani and Flora, or if she was feeling particularly passive-aggressive and vengeful she could have written to the offices of their new label, Hellfire Club, and in fact she had gone so far as to go to the magical Floor 4.33333etc. of the Seattle Public Library to look up their address in the owl order music magazines. _219 Waterloo Rd Floor 5 London England_. It was still scrawled on a post-it in the back pocket of some or another pair of jeans along with the bones of a letter establishing herself as Graeme’s perhaps-former bandmate and declaring in no uncertain terms that he could probably not be held to any standards of any contract up to and including one he had literally signed in person, because of numerous and glaring mental health and substance abuse problems not limited to… 

Walking up the road toward home for the necessary quantity of parchment to delineate said problems, heart slamming against her ribs, not only because of the hills, the sun came out from behind the thick winter cloudbank just for a moment, or maybe it only shone more brightly through a thinner layer in the low white-slate sky, and she stopped at a street corner, breathing, feeling the light and the warmth on her face and in her hair, and she thought, who ever said I could solve this? Who ever said I _should_ solve this? 

The sun moved again and with it the thick fog and for the rest of her walk up the hill the stinging needle rain blew in her face and stuck in her eyelashes. Somehow she felt lighter. It was not _giving up_ , she thought, so much as it was recognizing one’s own limitations. Her personal limitations had been exhausted. It was likely that Lockett’s limitations had been exhausted. Continued striving toward ambiguous ends when improvement hinged on a decision Graeme had to make himself seemed like a waste. That Pastels song, which usually sounded miles too twee for Alex’s noise-honed ears, circled in the back of her mind: _Simply nothing to be done_ … 

Back in the living room she gave the Spacemen 3 tape to Lockett, and he put it on, careful with the spools in the tape deck. “Love how they kept remaking all their songs over and over until they were perfect,” he said as the psychedelic-sweet tone of “Honey” kicked in. The song had always reminded Alex of a picture in one of Wray’s old National Geographics, profiling a tradesman living in a remote Turkish village who scaled cliffs to harvest hallucinogenic honey made by bees pollinating species of toxic rhododendron. 

“Do you think they’re perfect?” she asked Lockett. 

He paused. It seemed he hadn’t thought of that before. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think?” 

“I mean, I don’t think there’s an answer. It’s not up to us. But it’s relatable, isn’t it.” 

“What, making the same song over and over?” 

“Doing the same thing over and over with a couple changes. Expecting it to stick. To work — to be perfect because of that one little change.” 

She willed him to pick up what she was putting down so she wouldn’t have to fully articulate it. But he looked at her, meeting her eyes, daring her to go on. He probably knew she couldn’t resist a dare.

“We got rid of everything in the house,” Alex told him. She found herself doing the thing she vaguely understood she did onstage, which Wray had referred to delightedly as ‘optical crucifixion.’ “Me, Mercedes, and Marsden. Nothing in the house. I stopped drinking, personally. One of us tried to be with him all the time to keep him from doing anything… stupid. We put a record out, we toured… people call up the house asking for an interview and they want to talk about Wray. You put on the radio and _Nevermind_ is playing. Most people would feel like there’s no getting away from it. But Graeme is a wily one, as maybe now you know.” 

There was a little struggling color high on Lockett’s hollow cheeks and in the elfin points of his ears, one of which looked like it had been ripped through raggedly long ago, presumably by Montclair. 

“I guess I should have told you when you came by,” Alex went on. “That we had really been trying. But I think you know as well as anyone it’s not like someone can tell you to stop and then you just… stop.”

Lockett was looking away toward the door, as though he regretted stepping through it. With his head bowed just so Alex could see the root and run of the gray streak in his hair above his ear. She wasn’t sure if he would say anything. In their silence J. Spaceman phased through “Come Down Softly to My Soul” on the tinny tape player speakers. “I didn’t want to think,” Lockett said finally, voice tight, “but I think I knew. I didn’t want it to be so bad.” 

“It’s worse.” 

“I know that now.” He glanced into Alex’s eyes for a moment and then his gaze slipped away toward the cobwebby corners of the ceiling. Somewhere in the blurry depth of feeling she thought she’d seen a lightning-strike of conviction. “Too late I guess.” 

“Maybe.” 

“D’you think we’ll get a chance again.” 

_No,_ Alex thought. But she said, “Won’t be pretty.” 

“Wasn’t pretty this time,” Lockett told her. He scrubbed a hand over his face, straightened his back. Alex was certain of his conviction now. “What are we going to do?” he asked her. 

_Simply nothing to be done_ , sang the Pastels in the back of Alex’s mind. 

“What can we do,” she asked him. 

For his part Lockett did not seem to realize that that hadn’t exactly been a question. “How do we talk to him?” he asked. 

“I don’t — I’m not — I don’t know that I can.” She couldn’t look at him suddenly — it was the way his brow shifted sympathetically. She looked toward Wray’s room instead, staring intently toward the door, as though he or Graeme were still asleep in there. “It’s — I can’t speak to him. I can never articulate — it’s locked down there. Whenever I try it’s like trying to force it through a solid membrane and it just bounces back at me…” 

Graeme had these dark soft eyes in which there manifest either a horrifying drowning-well of emotion or a kind of flat gummy film. One was easier but not worth speaking to, and sometimes the other frightened her. She had never been one for being careful with the truth and indeed she wasn’t with anyone else she had ever known. With Graeme the truth was plain; it had been even plainer since Wray had died: You don’t want to get better, because it would mean living in your mind. But if even the barest glimpse into it blindsided her, who could blame him, really? 

“I can do it,” Lockett said. 

“Are you sure?” 

“No.” A painful smile moved quickly across his severe features, like a summer thunderstorm. “But, whatever. I’ll do it. Just tell me how.” 

At first she thought she’d give him Imani and Flora’s address from the letter. But then she remembered something. They went together through the kitchen to Alex’s room at the back of the house. The music she’d been working on was still circling around the little room, a few distorted guitar loops going, trapped in by the rough soundproofing spells on the doors and windows, which she was obliged to refresh every few months. In the afternoon wind and rain the bare branches of the prune tree in the backyard battered the torn screens. The scraping sometimes kept her awake at night but offset with the noise it seemed percussive and artful. 

“What are you working on,” Lockett asked her. 

“It was an elegy,” Alex told him, digging in her dresser, “like, for Wray, but it got… legs, and a brain, I don’t know.” 

“It sounds like — have you ever heard those recordings of sounds from space? Like other planets' radio waves?” 

“What? No.” 

“They sound like — well, not _un_ like this. Hums and whirs, kind of, like winds, bells…” 

He had leaned against her bed but when she turned to him he stood up. She handed him one of Wray’s old two-way mirrors, wrapped in a paisley silk handkerchief she’d found long ago on one of many Goodwill trips Crucia had embarked upon with intent to co-curate the most absurd possible onstage wardrobes. “It’s a two-way mirror,” she told Lockett, seeing his confusion. “Graeme took the other one. Don’t unwrap it,” she nearly shouted, the sight of Lockett’s fingers on the loose knot washing her in a sudden panic. “He’s somewhere on the other end of that.” 

“How does it work?” 

“Not really sure. If you look in, and he’s looking in, you can see and hear each other. Wray used to — he’d just yell my name at it until I heard it. So you could try that.” 

“They were Wray’s?” 

“Yeah, they were in his mom’s family… they’re really old, apparently. They’re pretty — you’ll see, they have this filigree around the edges…” 

Lockett put the mirror in the front pocket of his flannel shirt and buttoned it. “Alex,” he said, watching the tree outside scrape the windowscreen, and she could hear his sinking feeling in his voice, “what do I say.” 

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.” 

“What would you say, if you could say anything?” 

“I’d say, I love you, you fucking idiot, please don’t die.” 

“That’s a start.” 

“Yeah.” Her eyes were hot. “It’s a start.” 

Suddenly she couldn’t bear to discuss it anymore. Perhaps this was why they had all become friends to begin with — it was easier to talk about it (all of it) with sound only. Whatever this said about their common level of emotional intelligence or fortitude was not necessarily edifying. She crouched on the floor, knees cracking, and dug her old Casio in its decaying, silverfish-eaten cardboard box out from under her bed. 

“What’s that,” asked Lockett, sitting cross-legged beside her. His eyes were red in the corners. 

“Something else for you if you want it. You ever play keys?” 

“I mean, some; I know like two chords maybe…” 

“That’s fine. That’s way more than enough.” 

Dust bunnies skittered when Alex opened the box. The keyboard inside was beat up and taped and/or spelled together here and there, hadn’t been played in months, but she had written some of the first Crucia songs on it. Lockett pressed the middle C key experimentally. Evidently the last spells Alex had used were some pretty evil ones. She felt him mentally shifting through the magic. The tone he settled on was more Suicide than Spacemen 3. He looked up at her and then at her guitar, more reflexively than expectantly. Then he played one of his two chords, which was F# minor. 

“Drum machine — ”

“Got it.” 

Alex picked up her guitar and tuned it while Lockett added a slow, funereal beat and set it on a magical loop, arpeggiating the chord and its antecedents, circling them like sharks. She watched him, listening for a way in, conducting the spine of it into her own blood until at last she found it and drove a strike of elastic sound like a great mar of black paint into the rhythm. It stretched out, spread, like the clouds pulling apart. As she had been doing since she was fifteen years old she found the precise pitch that opened the old and the new wounds alike and dissolved her pain into the noise like sugar into hot water. Somewhere in the squall of it, in the process of the bloodletting, she thought she identified exactly what she wanted Lockett to tell Graeme. Of course it wasn’t so much words. She wove it into sound and pulled it hand over hand out of herself into the noise. 

Lockett looked up at her at the sound of it and met her eyes. She understood that he understood. She felt a wash of such powerful relief that she bent her forehead to rest against the body of her guitar to hide her tears. On the floor Lockett cut the beat and the arpeggiating rhythm to a short loop, stalling, waiting for her. 

She pushed the approximation of this feeling into her instrument. Then she played back into the loop, and Lockett spun it out again. Some mirror equivalent of his own feeling was inside the sound now: cold, bitter, and still as morning ice; a pitch of longing or loneliness like a single wild rose in the high gray grasses. They played together until it was dark outside. 

**Author's Note:**

> [some songs for graeme and lockett](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/176379528230/when-tomorrow-hits-fluorescentgrey-harry)
> 
> thank you from the core of my soul to dear [eve](http://montpahrnah.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [i'm here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [reference points for the story](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/tagged/minuet)


End file.
